第33章 THE FOURTH(6)

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine.Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union Library.This, however, he held to be remarkable rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness.Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their books.Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by the nearest and cheapest routes....

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs.Araminta Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes.He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure war....

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the intimate wisdom of things.He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself.It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor feared nor passionately loved,--a web of iridescent threads.He had luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of a gun....

4

All through those years of development I perceive now there must have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life Ihave set out to present.It was growing in me--as one's bones grow, no man intending it.

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me.One always of course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think Iever saw the world at large in any other terms.I never at any stage entertamed the idea which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the world,--the idea that the universe, whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God.My mother thought that Order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, everything alike; from the very beginnings of my experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc and the survival not of the Best--that was nonsense, but of the fittest to survive.

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me.I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then Ilaughed a little and loved him.I remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question-begging word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out.

Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liver-fluke and skunk, obviously it might lead anywhere; order came into things only through the struggling mind of man.That lit things wonderfully for us.When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was a various and splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets itself to tame.I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious finality for myself by eighteen or nineteen.I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as children do in learning to talk.Some will chatter at eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality.

So it is with young people; some will begin their religious, their social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties.Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another.It wasn't that there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the theoretical boy.