Brown on Resolution (8 page)

So Albert came home from school to a new world, a world where Mrs. Rodgers had to deputize for a mother who had vanished, her place preposterously taken by a shattered wreck in the hospital, moaning vaguely and turning dim, unseeing eyes upon him. He went on at school in the unimaginative fashion which was to be expected, but now his Wednesday afternoons and Saturday afternoons were spent in journeys to the hospital and in a few fleeting, worried minutes in a chair beside his mother’s bed.

She died hard, died game, as befitted the daughter of a self-made man. She rallied round despite the fearful things they did to her with knives. For a little while the authorities even began to think that she would make a recovery, unexpected and nearly inconceivable. For a little while understanding returned to her, and she was able to smile upon the scared little boy at her bedside and talk to him sensibly about his work—and his future. That future! There was one afternoon when she stretched her arm out suddenly from the bedclothes (a frightening arm; pain and suffering had stripped the smooth flesh from it and left it a skinny bundle of bones and tendons) and pointed at him.

“Albert,” she said, “Albert, you know about the Navy? You know you’re going to join the Navy?”

“Of course, Mother,” said Albert. That had been understood between them for years now.

“Promise me, then, boy,” said Agatha. Her eyes were too large for her thin face, and she gazed at him with an intensity which scared him.

“Of course I will, Mother. Of course.”

Agatha’s scarecrow hand dropped, and she turned aside her face contentedly again, much to Albert’s relief.

But before ever she had begun to regain strength the cancer which had gnawed at her lifted up its foul head again. There was a significant shaking of heads among the hospital staff. Next time Albert came he found a feebler, stranger mother still. She did not know him. Her eyelids were drooped until the line of the pupil they still allowed to show appeared inhuman and unnatural. She was inert and dreamy. Opium had her; the doctors were kind. She would die the pleasant death of the poppy, and not that of the lunatic torture of cancer. Each succeeding visit of Albert’s found her muttering and silly. Towards the end pain reasserted itself. Opium began to lose its mastery, and little stabs of agony showed themselves on her face, and a surprised ejaculation or two broke through her mutterings. Yet Fate was kind enough; Agatha’s life went out of her while she floated above a vast grey sea sombrely tinted with opium, while around her loomed up the immense beetling silhouettes of the battle squadrons, the grey, craggy citadels of England’s glory and hope. Their funnel smoke swirled round her, veiling the worried freckled face of the child of her sin, and she smiled happily. Mrs. Rodgers wept hysterically on Albert’s shoulder.

For Mrs. Rodgers had gloried vicariously in Agatha’s illness. It was of the right savoury type to appeal to her. It was something to talk about with pride to her friends, with much whisperings of gory and distorted detail; it was a disease from which only women could suffer, and hence a source of immense interest. ’Orsepitals and operations and cancer of the womb—why, they provided her with precedence in conversation for months afterwards. She had, naturally, full charge of the funeral arrangements subsequently too, and that was unmixed delight. There was a hundred pounds in Agatha’s account at the bank, so that Mrs. Rodgers had no need whatever to skimp or scrape about it. Agatha could have a funeral worthy of the lady she was. She could have the best oak coffin, and a first-class ’earse, and ’eaps and ’eaps of flowers—Mrs. Rodgers bought two or three wreaths out of Agatha’s money, because of course Agatha had not known enough people for their contributions to make a good enough show—and two coaches. Mrs. Rodgers was able to ask all her intimate cronies too, and indulge in all the orgy of ghoulish formality for which her soul craved. Albert had to have a black suit, and a black tie, and black gloves—Mrs. Rodgers would have insisted on a black shirt too if there had been any shadow of precedent for it—and travel in the first coach as chief mourner along with Mrs. Rodgers and Mr. Dickens, the vicar, and two of Mrs. Rodgers’s best friends. And there were mutes in plenty, in tall hats and frock-coats, walking with solemn, dignified sorrow beside the hearse. And when the business was over there was a real slap-up dinner at No. 37, with cold ’am and tongue and beef and tripe and port and sherry, with afterwards cup after cup of strong tea and delightful conversation around the fire with half a dozen women with their best party manners and black gowns. Quite one of the happiest and most satisfactory days in all Mrs. Rodgers’s life. Albert went through it all in a walking nightmare, and afterwards remembered hardly anything about it.

T
HERE IS LITTLE
enough need to lay emphasis on the next section of Albert Brown’s career. Aged fourteen and a half, he could not join the Navy (as he knew already) until he was fifteen and a quarter. Mrs. Rodgers fussed over him until even he, insensitive though he was, could hardly bear the sight of her. He said goodbye to his school with hardly a twinge of regret; he had early been impregnated with Agatha’s fatalistic tendencies and he could, even at fourteen, accept the inevitable without complaint. Totally without introspection and without much notice for the circumstances in which he found himself, he was never more than vaguely unhappy during the following nine months.

He had the sense to keep to himself his crystallized determination to join the Navy as soon as he was old enough—he never said very much at any time—and the school sympathetically found him an office boy’s position with a City firm. The only part of his life that he really hated was the bowler hat which convention compelled him to wear—even Albert could appreciate the hideous incongruity of a bowler hat on a fourteen-year-old head—and it was not until afterwards that he realized how much he detested everything connected with an office boy’s life. He left home (he called Mrs. Rodgers’s house ‘home’ still) at ten minutes to eight each morning, and he came back at half past six each night. He travelled on a tram to Blackfriars from Gamberwell Green and to Gamberwell Green from Blackfriars. He swept out the front office, he filled inkwells, he took messages (painfully learning his way about London in the process); he brought in cups of tea from the teashop next door (this was, of course, before the era of regular office teas); he copied letters; he was slightly initiated into the beginnings of book-keeping, he experienced the incredible boredom and occasional fierce spasms of work which everyone in an office experiences. And since ordinary diligence was habitual to him, and honesty was part of his mental content, and he had brains of a quite good average order, he was looked upon with approving eyes by the powers that were, and after six months his wages were raised from five shillings a week to seven and sixpence. This official recognition gave him no thrill of pride or pleasure; office life was a mere marking time before he took the tremendous stride towards the goal he not merely desired, but considered necessary and inevitable. The time came at length for him to take it.

When Albert Brown was fifteen years and three months old all but one week he approached the chief clerk and gave him the week’s notice which the law demanded. The chief clerk looked Albert up and down and whistled softly in surprise. He remembered painful experiences with other office boys, Albert’s predecessors, who were one and all slack and unpunctual and dishonest and given to lying and who were intolerable nuisances to every one. He contemplated with dismay a renewal of these experiences and all the bothersome inconveniences of having to train another boy. He realized that stock-taking, the quarterly upheaval, was nearly due, and that Albert’s absence would be really tiresome.

“What in hell do you want to leave for?” he demanded. “Or are you just playing up for another rise?”

“Don’t want a rise,” said Albert. “I only want to give notice.”

“Got another job, I suppose?” said the chief clerk.

“No,” said Albert.

“Well, you
are
a looney,” decided the chief clerk. “You’re getting on well here. In another six months—or any day, in fact, you’ll be junior clerk here. Look at
me
. I was junior clerk here, once. What in the name of Jesus do you want to give notice for? Had a fortune left you?”

“No,” said Albert.

“Well, what are you going to do, then?”

“I’m going to join the Navy,” said Albert.

“Whe-e-e-ew,” said the chief clerk; he was certain now that Albert was crazy.

The office entirely agreed with him. Only boys who were suffering from an overdose of penny dreadfuls would ever dream of leaving the sequestered calm of an office for the uncertain turbulence of a fighting service—and they would not do more than dream of it. As for acting upon the dream, throwing up a safe job for a trifling whim, that was sheer lunacy. The Junior Partner himself saw fit to emerge from his Olympian seclusion and to discuss the matter with this extraordinary office boy; there were almost tears in his eyes as he besought Albert to reconsider his decision; in the end he utterly broke down—broke down far enough, at any rate, to offer Albert yet another half-crown a week on to his princely salary if only he would stay on and not blast his career in this fashion. But even this mighty condescension and this magnificent temptation left Albert unmoved. He hardly noticed them, although the storm of incredulous astonishment his announcement raised (quite unexpectedly to him, for he considered it the most logical move possible to join the Navy at fifteen and a quarter) left him slightly bewildered. He persisted in giving notice. In the end the Junior Partner yielded. He patted Albert on the shoulder, and swallowed hard, and produced some second-hand platitudes about the Navy—‘wish more people had as much interest in the Navy’—‘very healthy and natural for a boy to want to join’—‘Nelson’—‘England expects’—‘hope you do well, my boy’. Then finally, and most extraordinary of all, he fished three half-crowns out of his pocket, gave them to Albert as his next week’s wages, and told him he could leave now and have a week’s holiday before taking the decisive step. For which ridiculous proceeding he was heartily cursed (privately) by the outer office, which he had heedlessly left office-boy-less, the while he earned no gratitude whatever from Albert, who did not find any joy in a week spent hanging disconsolately about, unnecessarily exposed to the maudlin pleadings of Mrs. Rodgers, who wept profusely over him at every opportunity, and who took it for granted that entry into the Navy implied an immediate watery grave.

Authority at Whitehall, when Albert presented himself, received him with open arms. This was the kind of stuff they needed for the Navy—an orphan without a relation in the world, and no half-starved weakling either, but a sturdy, well-set-up young man of undoubted physique. Educated too; three years at a Secondary School, nine months in a City office, with the very best of characters from both. Written characters were not much evidence with most of the stray candidates for admission to the Navy. Boys from good homes who joined at fifteen as a result of a vocation were either the best of material or woefully bad bargains, and Albert had all the earmarks of the good material. Albert’s birth certificate (Agatha, fifteen years ago had rendered herself, unknowingly, liable to imprisonment on account of a false declaration to the registrar) was duly inspected and passed. He had no legal guardian (Albert indignantly denied Mrs. Rodgers’s claim to that position) and no next-of-kin. That was all quite uninteresting; the Navy of course did not know (neither did Albert) that Albert Brown was the only son of Captain Richard E. S. Saville-Samarez,
GB
,
MVO
, nor that through his paternal grandmother he had two second cousins in the peerage.

Yet, however it was, Albert was a man of mark after six months at Shotley Barracks. His was not an original mind, Heaven knows, and he was not of distinguished personality. But a Secondary School education which had gone as far as the beginnings of trigonometry and mechanics was not common at Shotley. And he was not an institution boy, nor was he the starveling scion of a poor family either. The institutions which supplied a great part of the young entry were admirable affairs for the most part. They fed and clothed and even taught the waifs who drifted into them quite adequately, but no institution can help being an institution. The boys who came from them all displayed, unavoidably, some signs of being machine made. Independence of thought or action, careless assumption of responsibility, spontaneous action—all these are, inevitably, foreign to the boy who has spent all his life in a regular routine under close adult supervision in narrow contact with hundreds of his fellows. Albert, on the other hand, had the natural self-containedness of the only child; he was accustomed to independent and solitary action; even those hated months in the City office had served their turn in broadening his mind and accustoming him to keeping his head in encounters with strangers. His memory was good even though his brains were not brilliant, and little of the hard-earned knowledge gained at school had faded out during his City life. The very elementary mathematics taught at Shotley were child’s play to him even while they were stumbling blocks to his misty-minded fellows. The severely practical instruction in seamanship was a joy to his logical mind and his fingers were deft in their work and powerful when strength was demanded. Albert’s main competitors, in fact, were never the institution boys, but the sons of seamen—petty officers’ sons destined to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, dockyard artificers’ sons, and boys from coast towns, in all of whom the tradition of the sea was strongly imbued, and who had in most cases the same sort of advantage over Albert in seamanship as he had over them in theoretical work. But to most of these boys rules and regulations were a sad stumbling block. Breaches of discipline were unhappily habitual among them, thanks to their exuberant high spirits and independent intolerance of control. For them was the cane, the extra lesson, the awful terror of the Commander’s wrath. Good young Albert, who found discipline merely a convenient means to an end, knew nothing of these frightful penalties. His record sheets remained unstained by the black blots they bore in their train. Albert’s career moved logically and inexorably onwards through musketry and swimming and elementary gunnery and seamanship and drill, from second-class boyhood to first-class boyhood, from Shotley Barracks to HM Training Ship
Ganges
, until at last even first-class boyhood was left behind and he became a full-blown Ordinary Seaman in the newly commissioned third-class cruiser,
Charybdis
, which left Portsmouth late in 1912 to continue the old tradition (sadly weakened by new strategical arrangements) of showing the Flag in Eastern waters and to maintain the very necessary policing of those rather disorderly shores.