• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2082 0

it as a Jacobite clan proscribed and dispersed after Culloden, in a way which sometimes embarrassed those who did not know him well. “We have been uprooted and harried,” he would say. “There are only three classes in England now, politicians, tradesmen and slaves.” Then he would particularize. “Seventy years ago the politicians and the tradesmen were in alliance; they destroyed the gentry by destroying the value of land; some of the gentry became politicians themselves, others tradesmen; out of what was left they created the new class into which I was born, the moneyless, landless, educated gentry who managed the country for them. My grandfather was a Canon of Christ Church, my father was in the Bengal Civil Service. The capital they left their sons was their education and their moral principles. Now the politicians are in alliance with the slaves to destroy the tradesmen. They don’t need to bother about us. We are extinct already. I am a Dodo,” he used to say, defiantly staring at his audience. “You, my poor son, are a petrified egg.” There is a caricature of him by Max Beerbohm, in this posture, saying these words.

My choice of profession confirmed his view. “Marjorie Steyle’s boy works below the streets, in a basement, selling haberdashery at four pounds a week. Dick Anderson has married his daughter to a grocer. My son John took a second in Mods and a first in Greats. He writes penny dreadfuls for a living,” he would say.

I always sent him my books and I think he read them. “At least your grammar is all right,” he once said. “Your books will translate and that’s more than can be said for most of these fellows who set up to write Literature.” He had a naturally hierarchic mind and in his scheme of things, detective stories stood slightly above the librettos of musical comedy and well below political journalism. I once showed him a reference to Death in the Dukeries by the Professor of Poetry, in which it was described as “a work of art.” “Anyone can buy a don,” was his only comment. But he was gratified by my prosperity. “Family love and financial dependence don’t go together,” he said. “My father made me an allowance of thirty shillings a week for the first three years I was in London and he never forgave it me, never. He hadn’t cost his father a penny after he took his degree. Nor had his father before him. You ran into debt at the University. That was a thing I never did. It was two years before you were keeping yourself and you went about as a dandy those two years, which I never did while I was learning to draw. But you’ve done very well. No nonsense about Literature. You’ve cut out quite a line for yourself. I saw old Etheridge at the club the other evening. He reads all your books, he told me, and likes ’em. Poor old Etheridge; he brought his boy up to be a barrister and he’s still keeping him at the age of thirty-seven.”

My father seldom referred to his contemporaries without the epithet “old”—usually as “poor old so-and-so,” unless they had prospered conspicuously when they were “that old humbug.” On the other hand, he spoke of men a few years his junior as “whippersnappers” and “young puppies.” The truth was that he could not bear to think of anyone as being the same age as himself. It was all part of the aloofness that was his dominant concern in life. It was enough for him to learn that an opinion of his had popular support for him to question and abandon it. His atheism was his response to the simple piety and confused agnosticism of his family circle. He never came to hear much about Marxism; had he done so he would, I am sure, have discovered a number of proofs of the existence of God. In his later years I observed two reversions of opinion in reaction to contemporary fashion. In my boyhood, in the time of their Edwardian popularity, he denounced the Jews roundly on all occasions, and later attributed to them the vogue for post-impressionist painting—“There was a poor booby called Cezanne, a kind of village idiot who was given a box of paints to keep him quiet. He very properly left his horrible canvases