Brown on Resolution (6 page)

So Albert Brown grew up in a world of many sections. Upstairs there was his mother, who spoke to him softly and clearly, and whom he knew by continual experience it was best to obey promptly. On the other hand, he knew that if he could manage the perilous descent of the stairs there would be a warm welcome for him from Mrs. Rodgers, who was always ready with a word, or a piece of bread and butter covered with brown sugar, or an unimaginative although ready part in whatever game he chose to devise or some other equally welcome contribution to his routine. Yet Mrs. Rodgers, with all her honeyed or brown-sugared endearments, did not bulk one half as large in Albert’s imagination, and most certainly not in his affection, as did his mother, who played games really well, and who read entrancing books to him, and whose voice, with its sweetness and purity of intonation, was worth a thousand times as much as Mrs. Rodgers’s hoarse utterance. Outside the house there was the Street with its myriad mighty attractions—the carts with their big straining horses, mightily feathered about the fetlocks, hugely hoofed and grandly quartered, hides glistening and nosebags tossing; and errand boys and sweeps and buses and road-mending gangs, and toyshop windows and little boys and girls; and beyond the Street was the Park, where little boys with a high internal pressure of energy could run madly up and down and hoot and screech and scream and look at the boats on the pond and make friends with stray dogs and gallop back to where Mother was sitting and gallop away again at a gait alternating between that consonant with a horseman in a hurry and a locomotive with its whistle in full blast. The Park and the Street and Upstairs and Downstairs were all exceedingly splendid places most times, and if the earthrending unhappiness of childhood ever got a grip on you then there was always Mother’s sweet-scented breast on which to pour out your woes and Mother’s soft, round arms to go round you, and her nice hands to pat you on the back until your sorrows were inconsequently forgotten. Soon the world had a fifth quarter, which was School, presided over by an omnipotent deity called Miss Farrow, who knew everything, and who was so supremely great that you never realized her smiles might be intended for you, and who on terrible occasions wielded the cane with dreadful results upon such small boys as dared to be naughty. That cane was much more to be feared than any possible smacking Mummy might give.

In fact, Agatha, watching the development of her child with all the terrible detachment of a mother born to be gushingly affectionate and restrained by a hot ambition, came early to the conclusion that her son was not a genius, not greatly above the average brains, and much more amenable to discipline than ever she could picture Nelson or Drake to be in their childhood. He was an orderly and law-abiding sprig of modern civilization; school rules and home rules meant something to him unless the temptation to break them was of an unusually compelling nature. Agatha felt a little twinge of disappointment; surely a child so lawlessly conceived ought to be vastly different from the ordinary herd! But those plans, so often revised and lovingly re-revised during the six months at Colchester Road before Albert’s arrival, were easily capable of covering even this state of affairs. The calm foresight of a woman with only herself and her child to consider began to plan a new system of training aimed at carrying young Albert’s foot-steps with security along the thorny road of Admiralty.

Perhaps if Albert’s father had been a stockbroker Agatha’s thoughts would have been directed towards stocks and shares. If he had been an artist Agatha would have begun to study art; as it was, the fact that he was an officer in the Royal Navy gave her the first necessary impetus towards adopting the Navy as her hobby. The beginnings were small of course—it is not often that we are so fortunate as to be able to trace eventual vast enterprises from their earliest germ—but they blossomed speedily, and their fruit is recorded in the pages of history. Chance showed her how to study Naval appointments and movements in newspapers; and chance settled the matter by guiding her to the Navy List in the Free Library, where she could study the whole commissioned personnel of the Navy and watch the weary climb of Lieutenant-Cornmander R. E. S. Saville-Samarez up the heights of Seniority with the ogre of the age limit continually in pursuit. From this it was but a step to those books of reference which described every fighting ship in the world, and in which she could study each successive ship to which Samarez was appointed. It was not long before Agatha had quite a developed knowledge of armaments and tonnages and displacements. She could read about protective decks without bewilderment; she could even follow arguments on the burning question of ‘Should Armoured Cruisers take their Place in the Line?’ It was an extraordinary hobby for a woman to take up; but no one ever dare predict in what direction a woman cut off and isolated from the world will expend her energies. The Library found all sorts of books on its shelves to interest Agatha; she had no use for fiction of course, as became her upbringing, and she read Lives of various admirals, and Naval Histories, and the ‘Letters of Lord Nelson’. If essay writing had been in her line she could have written quite a fair essay on Howe’s Tactics on the First of June, or on Nelson’s refusal in defiance of orders to expose Sicily. Innumerable references in the books led her on to the study of Mahan and his classic studies of Sea Power, and from thence she was lured inevitably to deep and solemn consideration of the immense sombre inliuence of maritime supremacy, of the doctrine of the Fleet in Being, and other things which other people do not think twice about. With pathetic cunning she began to lead young Albert’s thoughts in the same direction. If Albert had no genius, then orderly training and astute education of taste might serve the same purpose.

Mr. Deane, the solicitor, could not understand it. He pulled his patriarchal whiskers and stroked his domed forehead, sorely puzzled by Agatha’s repeated demands that he should ascertain for her the conditions of entry on the
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, and the costs of a naval education and highfalutin’ absurdities. He ventured to point out that if Agatha persisted in her decision to send young Albert to the Navy she could count him lost to her from the age of twelve. Agatha fully realized it already, and set her jaw as she told him so. Agatha believed that self-sacrifice was the primary duty of mankind; that man (and much more so woman) was born to sorrow; and that she should give up her child seemed to her right and proper, especially if the Navy benefited. The British Navy was to her the noblest creation in the world; it was the outward and visible manifestation of the majesty of God. Mr. Deane sighed incredulously and impatiently; he had been brought up in a world where women never had any ideas of their own and never, never dreamed of acting contrary to masculine advice.

Perhaps it was this impatience of his which impelled him along the steep and slippery road on which his footsteps were even then straying. Perhaps he could not bear to see good money wasted on sending Albert Brown to the
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, and he embezzled it as the only method of prevention. Joking apart, Agatha’s insistence must really be taken into account in estimating the circumstances of the misdeeds of that venerable old hypocrite.

Temptation certainly came his way. A whole series of road improvements and tramway extensions and industrial developments in South-East London had led to the sale of a great deal of house property lately—Agatha’s included. Mr. Deane found himself in charge temporarily of a large amount of his clients’ capital. Mr. Deane—the awful truth appeared later—led two lives, one in the company of his good wife, and the other in the company of a damsel of a class which the newspapers sometimes designated as ‘fair Cyprians’. Mr. Deane’s expenses were naturally in excess of his income. Mr. Deane endeavoured to right such a state of affairs by tactful speculation. Mr. Deane selected the South African market as the field of his activities. Mr. Deane lost money, for South African securities slumped heavily before the threat of the South African War. Mr. Deane shrank from the thought of suicide, or of prison and poverty. Mr. Deane gathered together what remained of his clients’ negotiable assets and departed for Callao, accompanied by the fair Cyprian. The Official Receiver found much work to do in clearing up the ruin left by Mr. Deane.

Agatha’s money had nearly all vanished. The Official Receiver sorted out for her a tiny fraction of the original capital, but it was a woefully small amount. The fate which Will Brown had predicted for her money had descended upon it. It was that fact, that prophecy of Will’s, quite as much as anything else, which made Agatha set her lips and turn with energy into continuing her life’s work without reference to her family. She would not go back to them, nor crave their help. She would not have them say, ‘I told you so.’ The fine sewing which she had done lightheartedly before to earn luxuries now was called upon to supply necessities. Lucky it was that she had built up a connexion, and that not much further effort was needed to establish herself in the good graces of the local big drapers and gain herself a small but assured market. No
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for Albert now. If she had thought her father or her brothers would have supplied the money for that she would have gone back to them and eaten humble pie, eaten the bread of penitence and drunk the waters of affliction, but she was all too sure that they would not. Their idea of their duty towards her would include the necessity of boarding Albert out and getting rid of him, to the colonies or the mercantile marine, as rapidly, inconspicuously, and inexpensively as possible. They were heathens, infidels, upon whom the light of the Navy had not descended.

So fine sewing, embroidery, pleating and button-making continued to earn the daily bread of Agatha and Albert. One more set of plans had to be devised for Albert’s future. If he was to receive a commission in the usual way (perhaps it was as well that Mr. Deane had been involved with the fair Cyprian, for Albert might easily never have made his way past a Selection Board) then he must gain one in the unusual way. Commissions sometimes were gained by the lower deck—‘aft through the hawsehole’ was the technical expression. Albert must begin as a seaman and work his way upward. If he started with sound ideas on his profession, with enthusiasm—fanaticism—and a good general education, it might well come about. Agatha kept her two hundred pounds in the bank against that day, when he would need an outfit and some money to spend, and flung herself with ardour into the business of providing Albert with the grounding she thought necessary.

That was easy enough, for Albert was an amenable little boy, and he had not nearly enough personality (it would have been extraordinary if he had) to withstand the infection of all Agatha’s enthusiasm. A board school education was of course all his mother could afford for him, but a board school education backed up by strong home influence will do as much for any boy up to eleven years of age as any other form of education. Agatha had been taught at a young ladies’ college, but her sound common sense and mighty will enabled her to recover from this catastrophe. So that even while Agatha was entering upon the study of the higher aspects of Sea Power and gaining a blurred insight into the ballistics of big gunnery she was at the same time helping Albert with his sums and beginning his first tentative introduction to Drake and Nelson.

Tentative indeed, for Agatha found it impossible to bestow upon Albert the high dramatic insight which infused her dreams. Ships were just ships to young Albert. He could not picture them, as Agatha did, as minute fragments of man-made matter afloat on an enormous expanse of water, smaller relatively than grains of dust upon a tennis lawn, which yet could preserve, positively, and certainly, an island from a continent. Albert could not be impressed (perhaps it was more than could ever be expected of a ten-year-old) by the mighty pageant of England’s naval history. Lagos and Quiberon, the Nile and Trafalgar were to him mere affairs where Englishmen asserted their natural superiority over Frenchmen; their enormous consequences, both hidden and dramatic, were to him inconceivable. He was a matter-of-fact young man, and Agatha duly realized the fact, with vague disappointment. Even Agatha, with all her dreams and insight, could not foresee the sprouting of the grain she was sowing in such seemingly inhospitable soil.

W
ITH THE BIRTH
of her child Agatha suddenly entered upon a wonderful late blooming, like the blossoming of an autumn rose. She put on a little more flesh—but flesh in the 1800s was in no way the abomination it was to become in later years. When Agatha walked nowadays she gave hints of broad, motherly hips and ample, comfortable thighs beneath her skirt, and her arms were very, very plump and round, and her face had filled out smoothly and deliciously, accentuating the creaminess of her really lovely complexion. She was a fine Junoesque woman now, stately, queenly even, and her stateliness was borne out by the dignified placidity of her facial expression. She was a mother to be proud of—a mother, especially, to admire; small wonder then, that young Albert was strongly influenced by her ideas and never dreamed of acting contrary to them.

Little Mr. Gold loved her at first sight. He was a nice refined little gentlemanly man, whose name was most eminently appropriate, for he had hair of pale gold (not as much now, alas, as he once had had) and gold-rimmed spectacles, and across his insignificant little stomach was a gold watch chain with a gold medal. He was neat in his dress and precise in his habits, and when one was once able to overlook the faintly receding chin and the general lack of personality about his face he was quite a handsome little fellow; it was a pity that all his character had been refined right away. Mr. Gold in conversation often made great play with remarks about ‘leading boys instead of driving them’ and ‘kindliness always tells in the long run’, and these, it is to be feared, were outward signs of inward timidity, for Mr. Gold was a master at an elementary school—at the school Albert attended, in fact. Mr. Gold, when he was taking a class, would often make a great show of anger, he would shake his fists and try to make his eyes (little pale blue eyes) flash fire, and he flattered himself that by so doing he was successful in intimidating the boys, but Mr. Gold never entered into conflict of personality with boys singly, never caned one, lout of fourteen or child of eight, without feeling an inward tremor of doubt—‘What on earth shall I do if he won’t hold out his hand when I tell him?’ Mr. Gold had even developed the weakest characteristic of a master; he would send big riotous boys to the headmaster for quite minor offences, dodging a personal clash under the voiced explanation that they had done something much too wicked for him to deal with.