Mr. Pennett’s procedure for bringing me to my senses about “an University degree” was an excellent example of preaching to the winds. Good advice seldom sinks into the wayward mind of a young man, and in this case the carefully composed phrases meant nothing to me. The utmost I could do was to transmute his prudent precepts into some such sentiment as this: “The silly old blighter is trying to make me stay up at Cambridge when I’m absolutely fed up with the whole concern.” Not that I made any serious attempt to “carefully reconsider” my decision. I had not yet begun to train myself to think rationally about anything. No one was ever less capable of putting two and two together than I was. And he made a strategic mistake when he adjured me to “look ahead.”
I very much doubt whether anybody wants to look ahead unless he is anxious to escape from one condition into another more desirable one. Children hanker to be grown-up because they want liberty. But why should a young man who has inherited a net income of about six hundred a year find it easy or necessary to imagine himself as ten or twenty years older? If I ever thought of myself as a man of thirty-five it was a visualization of dreary decrepitude. The word maturity had no meaning for me. I did not anticipate that I should become different; I should only become older. I cannot pretend that I aspired to growing wiser. I merely lived. And in that condition I drifted from day to day. Ignorantly unqualified to regulate the human mechanism which I was in charge of, my self-protective instincts were continually being contradicted by my spontaneously capricious behaviour. When Mr. Pennett referred me to what he called “afterlife,” he was unaware that for me the future was a matter of the four seasons of the year. There was next autumn, and next winter, and after that next spring. But this summer was the only thing that I cared about. The phrase “afterlife” was also vaguely confused with going to church and not wanting to be dead—a perplexity which can be omitted from a narrative in which I am doing my best to confine myself to actual happenings. At the age of twenty-two I believed myself to be unextinguishable.
II
It was a wet and windy afternoon toward the end of September. We were on our way home from a seaside place in Devonshire, where we had been staying for a change of air. Aunt Evelyn was going through a period of bad health, and her headaches were probably much worse than she admitted. Anyhow, she had been content to do very little, and I caused her no anxiety, for I had “taken up golf” and most of my time and energy had evaporated on the links. The people I played with at Bidmouth were equally engrossed by the game, and if they had any ideas about things other than golf they showed no inclination to share them with me. Aunt Evelyn wasn’t sorry to be going home again; there was plenty to be done in the garden, and how the cats had got on without her she couldn’t imagine.
Of my own sensations about our return I have no recollection: I may have felt vaguely dissatisfied, but I did not consciously allow myself to criticize the purposeless existence I was leading. At Waterloo Station we changed from one train to another for the final stage of our through journey. On account of her feeling unwell Aunt Evelyn had taken first-class tickets, and this made me conscious that we had a social position to keep up. Gratified by the obsequious attentions of the green-flagged guard, I couldn’t help wishing that my aunt had tipped him more than a shilling. As she remarked, he was such a very nice-mannered man, and I assumed that he was expecting half a crown.
At any rate, it was a relief to settle down in a corner of the dark blue cushioned compartment after my aunt’s unnecessary fussification about the luggage. Raindrops trickled down the windows as we steamed out of the station, and I was glad to avert my gaze from the dingy and dilapidated tenements and warehouses which we were passing. Poverty was a thing I hated to look in the face; it was like the thought of illness and bad smells, and I resented the notion of all those squalid slums spreading out into the uninfected green country. While I perused a magazine called Golf Illustrated I stole an occasional glance at the two very first-class looking passengers who occupied the other corners of the compartment. One of them was a grey-haired lady with a crocodile-skin dressing-case and a fur cloak. She was reading a book with an air of refined hauteur. The other was a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed grey beard and a glossy top-hat which he had ceremoniously arranged on the rack above him. He was glancing at Blackwood’s Magazine, and he had a bunch of violets in the buttonhole of his opulent dark blue overcoat. From the
