Home > Authors Index > Arthur C. Benson > Upton Letters > This page
The Upton Letters, a non-fiction book by Arthur C. Benson |
||
Monk's Orchard, Upton, July 11, 1904 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ MY DEAR HERBERT,--I am going to pour out a pent-up woe. I have just escaped from a very fatiguing experience. I said good-bye this morning, with real cordiality, to a thoroughly uncongenial and disagreeable visitor. You will probably be surprised when I tell you his name, because he is a popular, successful, and, many people hold, a very agreeable man. It is that ornament of the Bar, Mr. William Welbore, K.C. His boy is in my house; and Mr. Welbore (who is a widower) invited himself to stay a Sunday with me in the tone of one who, if anything, confers a favour. I had no real reason for refusing, and, to speak truth, any evasion on my part would have been checked by the boy. It is a fearful bore here to have any one staying in the house at all, unless he is so familiar an old friend that you can dispense with all ceremony. I have no guest-rooms to speak of; and a guest is always in my study when I want to be there, talking when I want to work, or wanting to smoke at inconvenient times. One's study is also one's office; boys keep dropping in, and, when I have an unperceptive guest, I have to hold interviews with boys wherever I can--in passages and behind doors. What made it worse was that it was a wet Sunday, so that my visitor sate with me all day, and I have no doubt thought he was enlivening a dull professional man with some full-flavoured conversation. Then one has to arrange for separate meals; when I am alone I never, as you know, have dinner, but go in to the boys' supper and have a slice of cold meat. But on this occasion I had to have a dinner-party on Saturday and another on Sunday; and the breakfast hour, when I expect to read letters and the paper, was taken up with general conversation. I am ashamed to think how much discomposed I was; but a schoolmaster is practically always on duty. I wonder how Mr. Welbore would have enjoyed the task of entertaining me for a day or two in his chambers! But one ought not, I confess, to be so wedded to one's own habits; and I feel, when I complain, rather like the rich gentleman who said to John Wesley, when his fire smoked, "These are some of the crosses, Mr. Wesley, that I have to bear." I could have stood it with more equanimity if only Mr. Welbore had been a congenial guest. But even in the brief time at my disposal I grew to dislike him with an intensity of which I am ashamed. I hated his clothes, his boots, his eye-glass, the way he cleared his throat, the way he laughed. He is a successful, downright, blunt, worldly man, and is generally called a good fellow by his friends. He arrived in time for tea on Saturday; he talked about his boy a little; the man is in this case, unlike Wordsworth's hero, the father of the child; and the boy will grow up exactly like him. Young Welbore does his work punctually and without interest; he plays games respectably; he likes to know the right boys; he is not exactly disagreeable, but he derides all boys who are in the least degree shy, stupid, or unconventional. He is quite a little man of the world, in fact. Well, I don't like that type of creature, and I tried to indicate to the father that I thought the boy was rather on the wrong lines. He heard me with impatience, as though I was bothering him about matters which belonged to my province; and he ended by laughing, not very agreeably, and saying: "Well, you don't seem to have much of a case against Charlie; he appears to be fairly popular. I confess that I don't much go in for sentiment in education; if a boy does his work, and plays his games, and doesn't get into trouble, I think he is on the right lines." And then he paid me an offensive compliment: "I hear you make the boys very comfortable, and I am sure I am obliged to you for taking so much interest in him." He then went off for a little to see the boy. He appeared at dinner, and I had invited two or three of the most intelligent of my colleagues. Mr. Welbore simply showed off. He told stories; he made mirthless legal jokes. One of my colleagues, Patrick, a man of some originality, ventured to dispute an opinion of Mr. Welbore's, and Mr. Welbore turned him inside out, by a series of questions, as if he was examining a witness, in a good-natured, insolent way, and ended by saying: "Well, Mr. Patrick, that sort of thing wouldn't do in a law-court, you know; you would have to know your subject better than that." I was not surprised, after dinner, at the alacrity with which my colleagues quitted the scene, on all sorts of professional excuses. Then Mr. Welbore sate up till midnight, smoking strong cigars, and giving me his ideas on the subject of education. That was a bitter pill, for he worsted me in every argument I undertook. Sunday was a nightmare day; every spare moment was given up to Mr. Welbore. I breakfasted with him, took him to chapel, took him to the boys' luncheon, walked with him, sate with him, talked with him. The strain was awful. The man sees everything from a different point of view to my own. One ought to be able to put up with that, of course, and I don't at all pretend that I consider my point of view better than his; but I had to endure the consciousness that he thought his own point of view in all respects superior to mine. He thought me a slow-coach, an old maid, a sentimentalist; and I had, too, the galling feeling that on the whole he approved of a drudge like myself taking a rather priggish point of view, and that he did not expect a schoolmaster to be a man of the world, any more than he would have expected a curate or a gardener to be. I felt that the man was in his way a worse prig even than I was, and even more of a Pharisee, because he judged everything by a certain conventional standard. His idea of life was a place where you found out what was the right thing to do; and that if you did that, money and consideration, the only two things worth having, followed as a matter of course. "Of course he's not my sort," was the way in which he dismissed almost the only person we discussed whom I thoroughly admired. So we went on; and I can only say that the relief I felt when I saw him drive away on Monday morning was so great as almost to make it worth while having endured his visit. I think he rather enjoyed himself--at least he threatened to pay me another visit; and I am sure he had the benevolent consciousness of having brought a breath of the big world into a paltry life. The big world! what a terrible place it would be if it was peopled by Welbores! My only consolation is that men of his type don't achieve the great successes. They are very successful up to a certain point; they get what they want. Welbore will be a judge before long, and he has already made a large fortune. But there is a demand for more wisdom and generosity in the great places--at least I hope so. Welbore's idea of the world is a pleasant place where such men as he can make money and have a good time. He thinks art, religion, beauty, poetry, music, all stuff. I would not mind that if only he did not KNOW it was stuff. God forbid that we should pretend to enjoy such things if we do not--and, after all, the man is not a hypocrite. But his view is that any one who is cut in a different mould is necessarily inferior; and what put the crowning touch to my disgust was that on Sunday afternoon we met a Cabinet Minister, who is a great student of literature. He talked about books to Mr. Welbore, and Mr. Welbore heard him with respect, because the Minister was in the swim. He said afterwards to me that people's foibles were very odd; but he so far respected the Minister's success as to think that he had a right to a foible. He would have crushed one of my colleagues who had battled in the same way, with a laugh and a few ugly words. Well, let me dismiss Mr. Welbore from my mind. The worst of it is that, though I don't agree with him, he has cast a sort of blight on my mind. It is as though I had seen him spit on the face of a statue that I loved. I don't like vice in any shape; but I equally dislike a person who has a preference for manly vices over sentimental ones; and the root of Mr. Welbore's dislike of vice is simply that it tends to interfere with the hard sort of training which is necessary for success. Mr. Welbore, as a matter of fact, seems to me really to augur worse for the introduction of the kingdom of heaven upon earth than any number of drunkards and publicans. One feels that the world is so terribly strong, stronger even than sin; and what is worse, there seems to be so little in the scheme of things that could ever give Mr. Welbore the lie.--Ever yours, T. B _ |
||