Noble in Reason (3 page)

“Will you dance for us, Beatrice?” suggested my mother.

Beatrice hesitated. “I'd rather not if you'd excuse me,” she said politely in a light composed tone.

My heart sank. Though I would like to have seen her dance, I approved the modesty and propriety of her decision; but 1 feared there would now be a “scene” of the kind I most disliked. Dr. Darrell would scold, Mrs. Darrell would plead, Beatrice would scowl, pout or cry—I felt all her misery in advance for her.

“Very well, my dear, we won't press you,” said Dr. Darrell.

I was astounded. Such mildness, such urbane good manners, from a father!

“Perhaps you'd take your coat off and show Netta your pretty dancing dress?” suggested my father.

I was shocked by such a gross demand. But Beatrice after a moment's hesitation gave her quick charming smile and began to unbutton her coat. When her wrappings and snow boots had been shed, we all gaped at her in astonished admiration. Her frock was of a pale green chiffon, accordion-pleated—at that time a new device—which billowed in the draught from the hearth; her heelless dancing shoes were of gleaming bronze. Beatrice was not what I then thought of as a pretty girl, for her face was pale and oval, not round and pink like Netta's, but even then I was aware of the distinction of her appearance. She was tall and slender, with a thin, aquiline, aristocratic face, smooth straight hair of that familiar English shade known inaccurately as light brown—but it is difficult to find another adjective to describe it—and fine hazel eyes, in which light seemed to sparkle. She moved a pace or two; her
dress waved and shimmered, she seemed poised like a butterfly on those agile gleaming toes.

“I could play for you if you would dance,” said Henry suddenly from the rear.

Beatrice looked at him with interest but decidedly shook her head.

“Some other time, perhaps,” said Mrs. Darrell placidly.

“Yes. We must be off now, in any case,” said Dr. Darrell, helping Beatrice into her coat with large white skilful hands. “It's almost my surgery hour already.”

The Darrells left us.

“Pretty little girl,” said John consideringly as the Jarmayne brothers returned upstairs to the nursery. “Vain, though.”

“She's an angel!” said Henry hotly.

“Oh, chuck it, Henry!” said John disgusted.

I sighed. What a terrible family we were, I reflected; how disunited, how mutually antagonistic, how rude, how vulgar, how quarrelsome. How inferior to the Darrells! The Darrells' appearance, their manners, their quiet affable speech, I thought yearningly, were infinitely superior to our own. The very name of their house, Ashleigh, sounded far more genteel to me than the more Yorkshire name of our own, Ashroyd. I was ashamed that we Jarmaynes should be so unlike what a family ought to be; indeed I positively dreaded, although I longed for, another visit by the Darrells to our house, for they would be sure to perceive our oddness, our abnormality, especially of course my own. At the same time as I dreaded this possible adverse criticism, I also resented it; for in spite of my dislike of my father and brothers I was of course in-dissolubly bound to them by the ties of blood; I knew I would defend them with my life, though without in the least wishing to do so.

Tired by this weight of responsibility accepted though detested, I was yet too restless to sleep. The childish little
stories with which I had hitherto comforted myself in my lonely little back bedroom near the cistern seemed inadequate that night. But as I mused on the Darrells' visit, these stories took on a new form; they expanded, they glowed suddenly into colour; they became daydreams of a splendid world where a simulacrum of Christopher Jarmayne performed deeds of noble heroism before a brilliant and admiring audience. Trembling, sweating, my mouth parched, I lay with eyes tightly closed, inventing rapturous scenes.

From that night onwards I was a daydreamer. My dreams in sleep were usually anxious, but before sleep came, what a rich, exciting, satisfying world I roved in! The dream Christopher who fulfilled the wishes of my heart, by the way, never belonged to a family—his parents had always perished in suitably honourable disasters and his brothers and sisters had never been born.

Looking back now from an achievement, a happiness, which, though in reality moderate enough, would have seemed to me then Olympian, a positive blaze of glory, I am able to see that my passionate feelings then were true to my own situation only, false to all the others concerned. For when examined in the light of reason and knowledge, all that sinister atmosphere, that tumescent rancour, vanishes away. We were, in fact, a perfectly normal family—indeed we were positively admired, by the Darrells and others, for the warmth of our mutual devotion.

I was then ignorant that for a child to fall in love, so to speak, with the parent of the other sex and therefore to resent the parent of its own sex was a normal phase in the development of children, through which almost all safely passed. To me this state of mind seemed unique and permanent: I suffered agonies of martyrdom on behalf of my oppressed
mother, agonies of resentment against my despotic father. Nor did I understand, of course, the strength and kind of my feeling for Netta.

I was ignorant, too, of the laws of heredity discovered by Mendel; I regarded the variations of character amongst the Jarmayne children as alarming and wicked quarrels. Yet in fact we showed these variations in their most natural and normal form: the physical and mental characteristics of my parents mingling in each of us in different proportions, quite in the expected style. John had my mother's massive sensuous nature mingled with my father's business shrewdness; my father's fair colouring with my mother's texture of skin and hair. Henry had my mother's height and dark colouring, but my father's quivering, electric energy and disdain. In Netta, my father's blond quality was strongly emphasized, but she had little of his mental fibre, being pliant, slow and simple.

For myself, I was the only one in the family who inherited my father's disability of the eyes to any serious extent; I had too all his over-conscientious zeal, and his slight spare frame. But at the same time I had all my mother's responsive senses and distaste for personal restrictions. Indeed, my mother's and my father's temperaments were present in my make-up in proportions so equal that neither won the battle for dominance; they did not fuse but remained distinct, at war, while I was tossed from one to the other, or to change the metaphor, see-sawed between the two. Thus in my early life I was at one time invincibly lazy, at another invincibly energetic; puritanic and hedonistic by turns with equal conviction. Perhaps it was this experience of two such different attitudes to life which enabled me later to portray my fellow human beings, for I could sympathize with the most opposite dispositions. Perhaps too this see-sawing itself supplied the creative energy I required. But it was an uncomfortable character to own, for each side continually frustrated the other. Besides,
in me all my father's electric force was wired, as it were, to my mother's slow deep passions, so that my susceptibilities had an immense voltage; my feelings tore me to pieces, and any rebuke almost disintegrated my personality.

John and Henry passed, of course, through the same Oedipus phase as myself; that is to say, they were as devoted to our mother, as jealous of her affection and therefore as resentful of our father, as I was. But their natures moulded their resentment into different forms. John turned his dislike on my father's manners, which he thought affected, and on all pretensions to gentility, fuss about detail and meticulosity of any sort. He prided himself on being robust, earthy, not finicking but full of blunt common sense; he wished to be ordinary, he loathed the pompous and high-flown. The name Etherton typified for him everything he detested. Henry on the other hand condemned my father for not being high-flown and refined enough; he thought him an unedifying, ignoble little man; Henry could not endure the small daily business compromises my father thought necessary. To me as I have explained my father was an angry and terrifying kill-joy, mean, ignorant and plebeian in his rejection of all forms of freedom and beauty and his pursuit of wealth. To Netta he was an adored, adoring, protective, indulgent father.

All this, including my ambivalent feeling towards my kin, was entirely natural, nothing out of the way; phenomena shared by every human family; part of the price paid for human individuality; the common human lot. I see it now; and see the phenomena repeating themselves, endlessly varied in detail but basically the same, through generation after generation.

But what was in reality the truth about my father, upon whom so much dangerous emotion was concentrated? It was, of course, impossible for him to satisfy all of us or indeed any of us completely. But to this general problem he added,
naturally, those particular difficulties of circumstance which complicate each person's life. I could not, really, have been more wrong in my estimate of his condition and intention.

In his relation to my mother, for instance. Years after, when living alone with my father, whose mind was then somewhat disturbed, I learned the realities of his marriage. He was living alone in lodgings at the time—owing to family troubles which I will presently describe—in a nearby West Riding town, when he first met my mother, whose youthful beauty was as great as I imagined. But far from having the aristocratic connections I invented for her, my mother was in fact a mill-girl, a weaver at the worsted mill where my father was employed. Lonely and miserable, the young Edward Jarmayne (then only in his early twenties) found solace in my mother's passive beauty, just as we did. They became lovers, and in a very short time Ada found herself with child.

The Appia family was of Irish descent. Ada's father had first come to Yorkshire as a navvy employed on the construction of a moorland reservoir and had remained to work on the borough roads. A family large even by Victorian standards and swollen by several sets of twins, careless, slovenly and quarrelsome in their habits, the Appias lived in a fetid backyard in a poor quarter of the town where drink and brawls were rife. It was a household-where unwashed mugs and plates stood all day on a bare wooden table marked with innumerable rings; a household any member of which, if missing from the family circle, could usually be found in the Ring o' Bells inn at the corner of the yard. The temptation, in those “respectable” Victorian days when poverty was a crime, to abandon a woman of such low connections, a woman moreover to whom an illegitimate child was a not unfamiliar spectacle, must have been very great. My father, with an integrity or a love for which in either case I respect him deeply, “stood by” Ada
and against the recommendations of all his friends married her.

But such friends as he had made in the town dropped off, and my father came to believe that a fresh start in a place where Ada's origin was unknown would be wise, so shortly before John's birth he moved to Hudley. A small access of capital reaching him about this time, he set up as a cloth manufacturer in the traditional way, renting a few looms in a shed provided with power from the adjacent factory, and by great and continual efforts had become the owner of a small but promising business. About the time of Netta's birth, however, that is in the late 1890s, the tariffs imposed by the United States in protection of their own infant textile industry caused a sharp drop in the export of West Riding cloths, and my father's firm, much under-capitalized and without useful family connections, suffered severely.

Thus much of my father's history suffices already, I think, to explain many of the qualities his children disliked in him. But the half is not yet told; we must return to his troubles with his father's family.

My father was his father's eldest child. His mother died at his birth. My grandfather, a manufacturer at Ashworth, shortly married again and had several children before losing his second wife. He died while still in middle life, and was found to have left all his property to the children of this second marriage. Astonished and enraged, my father took the ill-advised course of bringing a suit against his eldest stepbrother for “undue influence.” He lost his case, and with it the few hundreds which had descended to him from his mother. Moreover, public opinion in Ashworth went against him; people thought he must have given his father cause for his disinheritance. Bruised and embittered, my father left the town. The money which eventually enabled him to set up for himself in business came from a rich girl cousin, Henrietta Jarmayne,
who conveniently died young. (It was from this Henrietta that my sister had her name.) My mother was always jealous of this cousin, not perhaps without cause; when, later, I heard the story of the legacy I at once jumped to the conclusion that Henrietta had loved my father, and that he would have done better for his comfort to stay in Ashworth and marry her; my father always looked sober and shook his head gravely, at any mention of her name.

But even this does not conclude the recital of my father's misfortunes, for my mother—constricted and unhappy, no doubt, in her new social sphere—shortly after John's birth began to take to drink. The habit grew on her. While she nursed a child, as the saying is, she was fully satisfied and did not need her other indulgence; when the child was weaned and walking she returned to it in despair. Netta (my father told me later) was born because of these recurring phenomena; I should not be surprised even, from the look my father gave me as he recounted these sad histories, to learn that my own birth was determined upon for the same cause, a child between myself and Henry having died in infancy.

So all my father's weaknesses—his exaggerated manners, his undue care for money, his distrust of my mother's impulses, his passion for cleanliness and order, his strict stern puritanic rules of conduct—all had their reason; all were a reaction against the unhappy circumstances of his own life, an anxious loving desire to protect his children from similar troubles. Knowledge of these circumstances and of the inevitable psychological stresses of family life has substituted a deep and loving pity for my father, for the hatred I used to feel for him in my heart.