William—An Englishman

William—An Englishman

By Cicely Hamilton.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. I
4. II
5. III
6. IV
7. V
8. VI
9. VII
10. VIII
11. IX
12. X
13. XI
14. XII
15. XIII
16. XIV
17. XV
18. XVI
19. XVII
20. XVIII
21. Colophon
22. Uncopyright

Imprint

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I

William Tully was a little over three-and-twenty when he emerged from the chrysalis stage of his clerkdom and became a Social Reformer. His life and doings until the age of twenty-three, had given small promise of the distinction of his future career; from a mild-mannered, pale-faced and undersized boy he had developed into a mild-mannered, pale-faced little adult standing five-foot-five in his boots. Educated at a small private school in the suburbs of London, his record for conduct was practically spotless and he once took a prize for Divinity; further, to the surprise and relief of his preceptors, he managed to scrape through the Senior Cambridge Local Examination before he was transferred to a desk in the office of a London insurance company. His preceptor-in-chief, in a neatly-written certificate, assured his future employers that they would find him painstaking and obedient⁠—and William, for the first six years of his engagement, lived up to the character given him. His mother, a sharp-eyed, masterful woman, had brought him up to be painstaking and obedient; it might be said with truth that as long as she lived he did not know how to be otherwise. It is true he disliked his office superiors vaguely, for the restrictions they placed upon his wishes⁠—just as, for the same reason, he vaguely disliked his mother; but his wishes being indeterminate and his ambition nonexistent, his vague dislike never stiffened into active resentment.

It would seem that the supreme effort of passing his Cambridge Local had left him mentally exhausted for a season; at any rate, from the conclusion of his schooldays till he made the acquaintance of Faraday, his reading was practically confined to romantic and humorous literature. He was a regular patron of the fiction department of the municipal lending library and did not disdain to spend modestly on periodicals of the type of Snappy Bits. He was unable to spend more than modestly because his earnings, with the exception of a small sum for fares and pocket-money, were annexed by his mother each Saturday as a matter of normal routine. The manner of her annexation made discussion singularly difficult; and if William ever felt stirrings of rebellion over the weekly cash delivery he was careful never to betray them.

With his colleagues of the office Tully was a negligible quantity. He was not unpopular⁠—it was merely that he did not matter. His mother’s control of the family funds was no doubt in part accountable for his comrades’ neglect of his society; but his own habits and manners were still more largely to blame, since besides being painstaking and obedient he was unobtrusive and diffident. There was once a project on foot in the office to take him out and make him drunk⁠—but nothing came of it because no one was sufficiently interested in William to give up an evening to the job.

The crisis in his hitherto well-ordered life came when his mother died suddenly. This was in October 1910. William had gone to the office as usual that morning, leaving his mother apparently in her usual health; he returned in the evening to blinds already drawn down. A neighbour (female) was in waiting in the sitting-room and broke the great news with a sense of its importance and her own; she took William’s hand, told him with sniffs that it was the will of the Lord, and entered into clinical details. William sat down rather suddenly when he realized that there would be no one in future to annex his weekly earnings; then, shocked by his lack of filial feeling, he endeavoured to produce an emotion more suited to the solemn occasion. Disconcerted by a want of success which he feared was apparent to his audience, he fidgeted, dry-eyed and awkward⁠—and finally, all things considered, acted well and wisely by demanding to be left alone. To his relief the demand was accepted as reasonable and proper in the first moments of his grief; the sympathizer withdrew, wiping her eyes⁠—unnecessarily⁠—and hoping that God would support him. He locked the door stealthily and stared at his mother’s armchair; he was a little afraid of its emptiness, he was also shocked and excited. He knew instinctively that more was to happen, that life from now on would be something new and different.⁠ ⁠… The armchair was empty; the masterful little woman who had borne him, slapped him, managed him and cowed him⁠—the masterful