There was no doubt that I had a fondness for books—especially old ones. But my reading was desultory and unassimilative. Words made a muddled effect on my mind while I was busy among them, and they seldom caused any afterthoughts. I esteemed my books mostly for their outsides. I admired old leather bindings, and my fancy was tickled by the thought of firelight flickering on dim gilt, autumn-coloured backs—rows and rows of them, and myself in an armchair musing on the pleasant names of Addison and Steele, Gibbon and Goldsmith. And what wonderful bargains were to be discovered in the catalogues of secondhand booksellers at Birmingham! Only last week I had acquired (for seven and sixpence) Dr. Burnet’s Rights of Princes in the Disposing of Ecclesiastical Benefices, 1685. First Edition. Original sheep, scarce. And there were Tillotson’s Sermons, ten imposing volumes in sage green morocco. I had bought them along with a twelve-volume edition of Doctor Johnson’s Works (in contemporary sprinkled calf), and had even read a few of the shorter Lives of the Poets (such as Garth, Broome, Mallet, and Sprat). I had also made a short-winded effort to read Rasselas. …
And now (disentangling the cord and rending the brown paper wrappings) Pope’s Homer had actually arrived. Six folio volumes, first edition, and they had only cost fifteen bob plus the postage. When I wrote for them (to a philanthropist named Cowler, at Reading) I made sure that someone else would have snapped them up. But no; here they were; in quite good condition, too. And how splendid, to be able to read both Pope and Homer at once! Homer had been impossible to enjoy in the fifth form at Ballboro’, but he would seem ever so much easier now. I resolved to read exactly a hundred lines every day until I’d waded through the whole six volumes. And when I’d marshalled them on the top shelf—for they were too tall to fit into any other—between the quarto sets of Smollett’s History of England and Tickell’s Addison, I solemnly abstracted the first volume of the Iliad and made a start.
The wrath of Peleus’ son and that dire spring
Of woes unnumbered, heavenly goddess, sing. …
IV
To those who are expecting to see me in the saddle again it may seem that I have delayed over-long in acquiring my first hunter. But I take this opportunity of reminding my invisible audience that there was no imperative reason why I should ever have bought a horse at all; in fact, candour compels me to confess that if I had been left to my own devices I should probably have spent the forty-five guineas on something else. For though I was living so quietly and paying Aunt Evelyn nothing for my keep, I never seemed to have much of a balance at the bank. And Mr. Pennett, who appeared to consider me utterly irresponsible in matters of money, had so far refused to disgorge more than £450 a year out of my estimated income of £600. So, what with buying books and a new bicycle, and various other apparently indispensable odds and ends, I found myself “going in for economy” when early in January Dixon began his campaign to revive my interest in the stable.
During the winter I had been taking a walk every afternoon. I usually went five or six miles, but they soon became apathetic ones, and I was conscious of having no genuine connection with the countryside. Other people owned estates, or rented farms, or did something countrified; but I only walked along the roads or took furtive shortcuts across the fields of persons who might easily have bawled at me if they had caught sight of me. And I felt shy and “out of it” among the local landowners—most of whose conversation was about shooting. So I went mooning, more and more moodily, about the looming landscape, with its creaking-cowled hop-kilns and whirring flocks of starlings and hop-poles piled in pyramids like soldiers’ tents. Often when I came home for five o’clock tea I felt a vague desire to be living somewhere else—in 1850, for instance, when everything must have been so comfortable and old-fashioned, like the Cathedral Close in Trollope’s novels. The weather was too bad for golf, and even “young” Squire Maundle was obliged to admit that the Amblehurst course was in far from first-rate condition. And there never seemed to be any reason for going to London, although, of course, there were interesting things to see there: (Aunt Evelyn was always intending to run up for the day and go to a matinee of Beerbohm Tree’s new Shakespearean production).
I seldom spoke to anyone while I was out for my walks, but now and again I would meet John Homeward, the carrier, on his way back from the county town where he went three days a week. Homeward was a friendly man; I always “passed the time of day” with him. He was a keen cricketer and one of Dixon’s chief cronies. The weather and next year’s cricket were the staple topics of our conversation. Homeward had been making his foot-pace journeys with his hooded van and nodding horse ever since I could remember, and he seemed an essential feature of the ten miles across the Weald to Ashbridge (a somnolent town which I associated with the smell of a brewery and the grim fact of people being hung in the gaol there). All the year round, whether there was snow on the ground or blossom on the fruit trees, the carrier’s van crawled across the valley with its cargo of utilities, but Homeward was always alone with his horse, for he never took passengers. In my mind’s eye he is invariably
