CHAPTER I
It was the close of a bleak, autumnal afternoon. All day long in the chill and windy atmosphere the dust had been driven helter-skelter along the shabbier streets of Clapham, whirling with it the leaves which had fallen from the depressed trees in the gardens of the innumerable semi-detached villas. Here and there, fragments of torn paper rustled spasmodically along the gutter as the driving gust caught them, orânow that the dusk had fallenâfloated spectrally for a few moments in mid-air, like disembodied spirits, essaying an upward flight, only to be baulked by a lull in the wind and to come suddenly to earth again, where they lay until the next gust of wind caught them.
Among the dismal streets not one was more depressing than Ursula Grove. As if to deprive it of the least trace of individuality it was but a connecting link between two more important residential roads running parallel with each other, and even these were not very important; hence it is obvious that Ursula Grove was humble indeed.
Each house had a yard or two of front garden entered through cheaply varnished wooden gate-lets, which announced in faded gold lettering that should anyone enter he would find himself in Seaview, or on The Riviera, as the case might be. Provided the name was inappropriate there appeared to have been no initial objection to its being anything. In fact, those responsible for the christening of these desirable residences appeared to have acted on the same principle as the small builder, who, erecting houses at too great a rate to be able to waste time in seeking appropriate names, was accustomed to choose them haphazard out of the newspapers, and thus christened two small stucco atrocities joined together in semi-detached matrimony, the Vatican and the Quirinal, because these two names appeared in the course of the same leading article.
Each house had a little bow window which belonged to the drawing-room. If these bow windows could have been removed and all the little drawing-rooms placed, as it were, on exhibition they would have presented an extraordinary likeness. There were the same three or four saddle-bag chairs, the same saddlebag sofa, the same little bamboo occasional table, and the same little gilt mirror; all luxuries that were rewarded, apparently, by their own virtue and a sense of their own unique beauty, for it was seldom that their owners enjoyed them. In the summer the blinds were kept down for fear the sun should spoil the carpet, which it certainly would have done if it had been allowed a fair field and no favour with the gaudy little stiff squares of cheap Kidderminster. These front rooms, although infinitely the largest and most convenient in the house, were never degraded to the level of living rooms, however large the family. Sometimes in the winter a fire was lighted on Sundays and the inhabitants sat round it, but by Monday morning at breakfast time all traces of this revel had disappeared, and the fire ornaments were back again, trailing their gilded and tawdry finery over a highly polished grate, glittering out on the darkened, frosty room, that suggested nothing so much as the laying out of a corpse.
These chilly arcadias were the pride of their ownersâ hearts, and if, when about their household work, they heard the door of the sacred apartment open they were immediately on the alert.
âWillie, what are you doing in the drawing-room?â
âNuffinâ, mama, I was only havinâ a look.â
âThen come out and shut the door immediately.â
Willie, old enough to be troublesome, but not old enough to go to school, would do as he was bid, at the same time impressed by his motherâs admonition with a sense of the splendour of the mansion in which it was his privilege to dwell.
The family always lived in the smaller sitting-roomâan apartment rendered oblong by the exigencies of the staircase. These rooms were invariably furnished, as were the drawing-rooms, with a depressing similarity: two horse-hair arm chairs with the springs in a state of collapse; six ordinary dining-room chairs to match; some framed Graphic Christmas numbers on the wall, an untidy bookcase, and the flooring a waste of linoleum with a little oasis of moth-eaten rug before the fire.
I mention these facts because the atmosphere of my childhood is important in view of my after development.
It was on such an evening as I have describedâat least, I am credibly informed that it was soâthat my father descended from his âbus two or three streets off, and, after threading his way through the intervening maze of semi-detached villadom, entered the depressing length of Ursula Grove.
An unusual though not astonishing sight met his eyes. The blinds of the first-floor-front of his own house were drawn down and a bright light from within glowed against them and streamed from under them. It could not be his wife dressing for dinner, for they did not have dinner, and had they been in the habit of dining neither of them would have thought of dressing. Their evening meal was tea; it might be with an egg or it might be with ham, but it was certainly tea.
My father hastened his footsteps. The cause of this phenomenon had suddenly dawned on him. He opened the wooden gate-let with unwonted gentleness and without letting it swing to, which was the usual signal that he had come home. Then he went round to the back and softly let himself in.
He walked along the passage and paused at the foot of the stairs. There was borne down to him from above the wail of an infant. He was obliged to catch hold of the bannisters, for his heart leapt into his mouth and nearly suffocated him.
He sat down on the stairs to recover himself, while the tears of joy and pride welled into his tired eyes and flowed down his faded cheeks.
The doctor on his way downstairs nearly fell over him.
âCome, come, Mr. Rank, you must bear up. âIn the midst of life we are in death.ââ
Apparently the doctor was condoling from force of habit. The speech was certainly alarming, and my father whitened.
âBut my wife?â
âMother and child, Mr. Rank, both doing well. Itâs a boy.â
The alarm disappeared from his face. He was a father at last. âAn Isaac was born unto him.â
âMay I go up?â he asked timidly.
âMost certainly, but be careful not to excite the patient.â
My father went upstairs and knocked nervously. The nurse opened the door holding me in her arms. It is to my fatherâs credit, however, that he hardly cast a look at the desire of their married life, but crossed at once to the bed.
My poor mother looked up tenderly and lovingly at the dowdy little figure bending over her, and smiled.
âItâs a boy,â she whispered, and then added: âWe wanted a boy.â
My father pressed her hand gently, but remembering the doctorâs instructions not to excite the patient kissed her lips and stole gently out to look at his first, though somewhat late, born. A puckered face, to which the blood rushed spasmodically, clouding it almost to the suggestion of apoplexy, was all he could see. My father looked down at me and saw that I was dark. I could not well have been otherwise if he were to believe himself my father, for he was Jewish from the crown of his well-shaped head to the soles of his rather large feet.
If my mother is to be credited, he was when she fell in love with him a singularly handsome little man, but at the time of my birth the physical blight which falls on nearly all men of our race towards middle age was upon him.
She possessed a small cabinet photograph of him, taken when such things were a novelty. In early years I was accustomedâmisled by the out-of-date clothesâto regard it as a very frumpish affair indeed. When I grew up I came to think otherwise: for one day, placing my hand over the offending clothes, there looked out at me a face which, granting the wonderful complexion which my mother always insisted he possessed, was singularly handsome and very like my own.
I only remember him as a faded little creature, who had run to stomach to an extent which was absurd, especially when it was contrasted with the extreme thinness of the rest of his body. He was a commercial traveller, and always attributed this inharmonious excrescence on an otherwise slim form to the amount of aerated waters he was obliged to mix with those drinks the taking of which was indispensable to his calling.
My mother was dark too, so it was little wonder that such hair as I had when I was born was of the blackest imaginable hue, as likewise were my eyes.
âHeâs a beautiful baby; a bit small, but beautiful,â said the nurse.
My father, who could not at the moment dissociate my appearance from Mr. Darwinâs theory of the origin of species, tried to believe her, and stole downstairs, where he made his own tea and boiled himself a couple of eggs. A meat pie with the unbaked crust lying beside it suggested that I had arrived quite unexpectedly, as indeed had been the case. This perhaps accounted for the fact that as a baby I was weakly.
Before the first year of my life was over, my doting parents had gone through many an agony of suspense, and my father had more than once slackened his steps on returning home after his dayâs work, fearing to enter the house lest my mother should meet him and weeping inform him that the tiny thread of life, by which I was alone prevented from flying away and becoming a little angel, had snapped.
But by dint of the greatest care from a mother, who, whatever may have been her coldness to the outside world, possessed a burning affection for her husband and child, I was brought safely to my first birthday.
Sitting here during the last few unpleasant days with nothing to entertain me but the faces of ever-changing wardersâwhose personalities seem all to have been supplied from one patternâI have had time to think over many things, and I have more than once reflected whether I would not rather my mother had been less careful and had allowed the before mentioned tiny thread to snap.
My present nervousness, which even my worst enemy will find excusable, tempts me to regret that her extreme care was so well rewarded. My intellect, however, which has always shone brightly through the murk of my emotions, tells meâand supports the information with irrefutable logicâthat I am an ignoble fool to think anything of the kind. I question whether Napoleon would have foregone his triumphant career to escape St. Helena. The principle involved in his case and my own is the same. I have had a great career; I am paying for itâonly fortunately the public are asking an absurdly low price. It is only when I have smoked too many cigarettes that I feel nervous about Mondayâs ceremony.
One thing I trust, however, and that is that my mother will not in any way be made unhappy, for should her spirit have the power of seeing my present condition, and of suffering by reason of it, it would give me the greatest concern.
But to resume. My arrival must have been an immense comfort to my mother even more than to my father. His business frequently took him away from home for a week at a time, and although he rarely failed to be with us from Saturday till Monday the shabby little Clapham house had been very dull till my shrill baby cries broke the silence of his absence.
Until I arrived to keep her company my mother had been thrown almost entirely on her own resources, and the reason of this loneliness is also the reason of my strange career. They are inseparable one from the other.
My mother had married beneath her. Her father had been a solicitor in a fair way of business, blessed with one son and one daughter. They were not rich but they were gentlefolk, and by descent something more. In fact, only nine lives stood between my motherâs brother and one of the most ancient peerages in the United Kingdom.
My motherâs maiden name was Gascoyne, and her father was the great-grandson of a younger son. Her fatherâs family had for the last two generations drifted away from, and ceased to have any acquaintance with, the main and aristocratic branch of the family. Beyond a couple of ancestral portraits, the one of Lord George Gascoyne, my motherâs great-grandfather, and the other of that spendthriftâs wife, there was no visible evidence that they were in any way of superior social extraction to their well-to-do but suburban surroundings.
My father and mother were brought together in this way. My motherâs brother belonged to a cricket club of which my father was also a member. The two struck up a friendship, although at a first glance there could appear to be very little in common between the successful solicitorâs heir and the junior clerk in a wholesale city house. My father, however, had a gift of music which recommended him strongly to his new friend, and, as my mother always said, a natural refinement of manner which made him a quite possible guest at the quasi-aristocratic house of the Gascoynes.
âPerhaps I was sentimental and foolish,â my mother would say, with that quiet, unemotional voice of hers which caused strangers to doubt whether she could ever be either, âbut he had such beautiful eyes and played in such an unaffected, dreamy way. And he was so good,â she would add, as if this were the quality which in the end had impressed her most. âHe might have been much better off than he was, only he never could do anything underhand or mean. I donât think such things ever even tempted him. He was simply above them.â
My father became a great favourite with the household till he committed the intolerable impertinence of falling in love with Miss Gascoyne. From the position of an ever welcome guest he descended to that of a âpresuming little Jewish quill-driver,â as my uncleâwhose friendship for him had always been of a somewhat patronising orderâdescribed him.
In fact, my uncle was considerably more bitter in denouncing his presumption than my grandfather, who, his first irritation over, went so far as to suggest that the best should be made of a bad job, and that they should turn him into a lawyer, urging his nationality as a plea that his admission into the firm was not likely to do any harm.
But my uncle was certainly right in receiving such a proposal with derision.
âHe hasnât even got the qualities of his race,â he saidâalthough this very fact had been, till their quarrel, a constantly reiterated argument in my fatherâs favour.
My father and mother were forbidden to meet, and so one Sunday morningâSunday being the only day on which my father could devote the whole day to so important an eventâmy mother stole out of the house and they were married before morning service, on a prospective income of a hundred a year. As mad a piece of sentimental folly as was ever perpetrated by a pair of foolish lovers.
The strange thing was that they were happy. They loved one another devotedly, and my grandfatherâthough quite under the thumb of my uncleâsurreptitiously paid the rent of the small house where they spent the whole of their married life, and which after a time, still unknown to my uncle, he bought for them. My uncle, whom even when I was a child I thought a singularly interesting manâand the estrangement was certainly one of the griefs of my motherâs lifeâhad a great opinion of himself on account of the family from which he was derived.
He made a point of having in readiness all proofs of his claim to the title in case the extraordinary event should happen of the intervening lives going out one after the other like a row of candles. His researches on the subject enabled him to show a respectable number of instances in which an heir even as distant as himself had succeeded.
My motherâs unequal marriage caused him to make all haste in choosing a wife. He might not have betrayed nearly so much antipathy to my father as a brother-in-law had not the Gascoyne earldom been one of the few peerages capable of descending through the female line. Thus, till he should have an heir of his own, his sister and any child of hers stood next in succession.
He chose his wife with circumspection. She was the daughter of a baronet, not so reduced as to have ceased to be respectable; and the main point was that the match would look well on the family tree. To his infinite chagrin his first child died an hour after birth, and Mrs. Gascoyne suffered so severely that a consolation was impossible. It thus became inevitable that should the unexpected happen the title would pass after himself to his sister and her children.
He drew some comfort from the fact that so far my father and mother had no child.
Whether it was the disappointment of his own childlessness, or a natural disposition to ostentation, I do not know, but from this time my uncleâs mode of living grew more extravagant.
Through the death of my grandfather he became the head of the firm. He left the suburbs where he had been born, and he and his wife set up house in the West End, where they moved in a very expensive set, so expensive, in fact, that in less than five years my uncle, to avoid criminal proceedingsâwhich must have ensued as the result of a protracted juggling with clientsâ moneyâput a bullet through his brains.
He was much mourned by my father and mother, who had both loved him. He was a fine, handsome fellow, good-natured at heart, and they had always deemed it certain that one day a reconciliation would take place.
Inasmuch as my parents had never met my aunt she could not become less to them than she had been, but evidently to show how little she desired to have anything to do with them, she allowed their letter of condolence to remain unanswered. Those who were responsi...