Chantry House

WIN AND SLOW

‘The rude will shuffle through with ease enough:
Great schools best suit the sturdy and the rough.’

    Cowper.
At school Griffith was very happy, and brilliantly successful, alike in study and sport, though sports were not made prominent in those days, and triumphs in them were regarded by the elders with doubtful pride, lest they should denote a lack of attention to matters of greater importance.  All his achievements were, however, poured forth by himself and Clarence to Emily and me, and we felt as proud of them as if they had been our own.

Clarence was industrious, and did not fail in his school work, but when he came home for the holidays there was a cowed look about him, and private revelations were made over my sofa that made my flesh creep.  The scars were still visible, caused by having been compelled to grasp the bars of the grate bare-handed; and, what was worse, he had been suspended outside a third story window by the wrists, held by a schoolfellow of thirteen!

‘But what was Griff about?’ I demanded, with hot tears of indignation.

‘Oh, Win!—that’s what they call him, and me Slow—he said it would do me good.  But I don’t think it did, Eddy.  It only makes my heart beat fit to choke me whenever I go near the passage window.’

I could only utter a vain wish that I had been there and able to fight for him, and I attacked Griff on the subject on the first opportunity.

‘Oh!’ was his answer, ‘it is only what all fellows have to bear if there’s no pluck in them.  They tried it on upon me, you know, but I soon showed them it would not do’—with the cock of the nose, the flash of the eyes, the clench of the fist, that were peculiarly Griff’s own; and when I pleaded that he might have protected Clarence, he laughed scornfully.  ‘As to Slow, wretched being, a fellow can’t help bullying him.  It comes as natural as to a cat with a mouse.’  On further and reiterated pleadings, Griff declared, first, that it was the only thing to do Slow any good, or make a man of him; and next, that he heartily wished that Winslow junior had been Miss Clara at once, as the fellows called him—it was really hard on him (Griff) to have such a sneaking little coward tied to him for a junior!

I particularly resented the term Slow, for Clarence had lately been the foremost of us in his studies; but the idea that learning had anything to do with the matter was derided, and as time went on, there was vexation and displeasure at his progress not being commensurate with his abilities.  It would have been treason to schoolboy honour to let the elders know that though a strong, high-spirited popular boy like ‘Win’ might venture to excel big bullying dunces, such fair game as poor ‘Slow’ could be terrified into not only keeping below them, but into doing their work for them.  To him Cowper’s ‘Tirocinium’ had only too much sad truth.

As to his old failing, there were no special complaints, but in those pre-Arnoldian times no lofty code of honour was even ideal among schoolboys, or expected of them by masters; shuffling was thought natural, and allowances made for faults in indolent despair.

My mother thought the Navy the proper element of boyhood, and her uncle the Admiral promised a nomination,—a simple affair in those happy days, involving neither examination nor competition.  Griffith was, however, one of those independent boys who take an aversion to whatever is forced on them as their fate.  He was ready and successful with his studies, a hero among his comrades, and preferred continuing at school to what he pronounced, on the authority of the nautical tales freely thrown in our way, to be the life of a dog, only fit for the fool of the family; besides, he had once been out in a boat, tasted of sea-sickness, and been laughed at.  My father was gratified, thinking his brains too good for a midshipman, and pleased that he should wish to tread in his own steps at Harrow and Oxford, and thus my mother could not openly regret his degeneracy when all the rest of us were crazy over Tom Cringle’s Log, and ready to envy Clarence when the offer was passed on to him, and he appeared in the full glory of his naval uniform.  Not much choice had been offered to him.  My mother would have thought it shameful and ungrateful to have no son available, my father was glad to have the boy’s profession fixed, and he himself was rejoiced to escape from the miseries he knew only too well, and ready to believe that uniform and dirk would make a man of him at once, with all his terrors left behind.  Perhaps the chief drawback was that the ladies would say, ‘What a darling!’ affording Griff endless opportunities for the good-humoured mockery by which he concealed his own secret regrets.  Did not even Selina Clarkson, whose red cheeks, dark blue eyes, and jetty profusion of shining curls, were our notion of perfect beauty, select the little naval cadet for her partner at the dancing master’s ball?

In the first voyage, a cruise in the Pacific, all went well.  The good Admiral had carefully chosen ship and captain; there were an excellent set of officers, a good tone among the midshipmen, and Clarence, who was only twelve years old, was constituted the pet of the cockpit.  One lad in especial, Coles by name, attracted by Clarence’s pleasant gentleness, and impelled by the generosity that shields the weak, became his guardian friend, and protected him from all the roughnesses in his power.  If there were a fault in that excellent Coles, it was that he made too much of a baby of his protégé, and did not train him to shift for himself: but wisdom and moderation are not characteristics of early youth.  At home we had great enjoyment of his long descriptive letters, which came under cover to our father at the Admiralty, but were chiefly intended for my benefit.  All were proud of them, and great was my elation when I heard papa relate some fact out of them with the preface, ‘My boy tells me, my boy Clarence, in the Calypso; he writes a capital letter.’

How great was our ecstasy when after three years and a half we had him at home again; handsome, vigorous, well-grown, excellently reported of, fully justifying my mother’s assurances that the sea would make a man of him.  There was Griffith in the fifth form and a splendid cricketer, but Clarence could stand up to him now, and Harrovian exploits were tame beside stories of sharks and negroes, monkeys and alligators.  There was one in particular, about a whole boat’s crew sitting down on what they thought was a fallen tree, but which suddenly swept them all over on their faces, and turned out to be a boa-constrictor, and would have embraced one of them if he had not had the sail of the boat coiled round the mast, and palmed off upon him, when he gorged it contentedly, and being found dead on the next landing, his skin was used to cover the captain’s sea-chest.  Clarence declined to repeat this tale and many others before the elders, and was displeased with Emily for referring to it in public.  As to his terrors, he took it for granted that an officer of H.M.S. Calypso, had left them behind, and in fact, he naturally forgot and passed over what he had not been shielded from, while his hereditary love of the sea really made those incidental to his profession much more endurable than the bullying he had undergone at school.

We were very happy that Christmas, and very proud of our boys.  One evening we were treated to a box at the pantomime, and even I was able to go to it.  We put our young sailor and our sister in the forefront, and believed that every one was as much struck with them as with the wonderful transformations of Goody-Two-Shoes under the wand of Harlequin.  Brother-like, we might tease our one girl, and call her an affected little pussy cat, but our private opinion was that she excelled all other damsels with her bright blue eyes and pretty curling hair, which had the same chestnut shine as Griff’s—enough to make us correct possible vanity by terming it red, though we were ready to fight any one else who presumed to do so.  Indeed Griff had defended its hue in single combat, and his eye was treated for it with beefsteak by Peter in the pantry.  We were immensely, though silently, proud of her in her white embroidered cambric frock, red sash and shoes, and coral necklace, almost an heirloom, for it had been brought from Sicily in Nelson’s days by my mother’s poor young father.  How parents and doctors in these days would have shuddered at her neck and arms, bare, not only in the evening, but by day!  When she was a little younger she could so shrink up from her clothes that Griff, or little Martyn, in a mischievous mood, would put things down her back, to reappear below her petticoats.  Once it was a dead wasp, which descended harmlessly the length of her spine!  She was a good-humoured, affectionate, dear sister, my valued companion, submitting patiently to be eclipsed when Clarence was present, and everything to me in his absence.  Sturdy little Martyn too, was held by us to be the most promising of small boys.  He was a likeness of Clarence, only stouter, hardier, and without the delicate, girlish, wistful look; imitating Griff in everything, and rather a heavy handful to Emily and me when left to our care, though we were all the more proud of his high spirit, and were fast becoming a mutual admiration society.

What then were our feelings when Griff, always fearless, dashed to the rescue of a boy under whom the ice had broken in St. James’ Park, and held him up till assistance came?  Martyn, who was with him, was sent home to fetch dry clothes and reassure my mother, which he did by dashing upstairs, shouting, ‘Where’s mamma?  Here’s Griff been into the water and pulled out a boy, and they don’t know if he is drowned; but he looks—oh!’

Even after my mother had elicited that Martyn’s he meant the boy, and not Griff, she could not rest without herself going to see that our eldest was unhurt, greet him, and bring him home.  What happy tears stood in her eyes, how my father shook hands with him, how we drank his health after dinner, and how ungrateful I was to think Clarence deserved his name of Slow for having stayed at home to play chess with me because my back was aching, when he might have been winning the like honours!  How red and gruff and shy the hero looked, and how he entreated no one to say any more about it!

He would not even look publicly at the paragraph about it in the paper, only vituperating it for having made him into ‘a juvenile Etonian,’ and hoping no one from Harrow would guess whom it meant.

I found that paragraph the other day in my mother’s desk, folded over the case of the medal of the Royal Humane Society, which Griff affected to despise, but which, when he was well out of the way, used to be exhibited on high days and holidays.  It seems now like the boundary mark of the golden days of our boyhood, and unmitigated hopes for one another.

CHAPTER IV

UBI LAPSUS, QUID FECI

‘Clarence is come—false, fleeting, perjured Clarence.’

    King Richard III.
There was much stagnation in the Navy in those days in the reaction after the great war; and though our family had fair interest at the Admiralty, it was seven months before my brother went to sea again.  To me they were very happy months, with my helper of helpers, companion of companions, who made possible to me many a little enterprise that could not be attempted without him.  My father made him share my studies, and thus they became doubly pleasant.  And oh, ye boys! who murmur at the Waverley Novels as a dry holiday task, ye may envy us the zest and enthusiasm with which we devoured them in their freshness.  Strangely enough, the last that we read together was the Fair Maid of Perth.

Clarence and his friend Coles longed to sail together again, but Coles was shelved; and when Clarence’s appointment came at last, it was to the brig Clotho, Commander Brydone, going out in the Mediterranean Fleet, under Sir Edward Codrington.  My mother did not like brigs, and my father did not like what he heard of the captain; but there had been jealous murmurs about appointments being absorbed by sons of officials—he durst not pick and choose; and the Admiral pronounced that if the lad had been spoilt on board the Calypso, it was time for him to rough it—a dictum whence there was no appeal.

Half a year later the tidings of the victory of Navarino rang through Europe, and were only half welcome to the conquerors; but in our household it is connected with a terrible recollection.  Though more than half a century has rolled by, I shrink from dwelling on the shock that fell on us when my father returned from Somerset House with such a countenance that we thought our sailor had fallen; but my mother could brook the fact far less than if her son had died a gallant death.  The Clotho was on her way home, and Midshipman William Clarence Winslow was to be tried by court-martial for insubordination, disobedience, and drunkenness.  My mother was like one turned to stone.  She would hardly go out of doors; she could scarcely bring herself to go to church; she would have had my father give up his situation if there had been any other means of livelihood.  She could not talk; only when my father sighed, ‘We should never have put him into the Navy,’ she hotly replied,

‘How was I to suppose that a son of mine would be like that?’

Emily cried all day and all night.  Some others would have felt it a relief to have cried too.  In more furious language than parents in those days tolerated, Griff wrote to me his utter disbelief, and how he had punched the heads of fellows who presumed to doubt that it was not all a rascally, villainous plot.

When the time came my father went down by the night mail to Portsmouth.  He could scarcely bear to face the matter; but, as he said, he could not have it on his conscience if the boy did anything desperate for want of some one to look after him.  Besides, there might be some explanation.

‘Explanation,’ said my mother bitterly.  ‘That there always is!’

The ‘explanation’ was this—I have put together what came out in evidence, what my father and the Admiral heard from commiserating officers, and what at different times I learned from Clarence himself.  Captain Brydone was one of the rough old description of naval men, good sailors and stern disciplinarians, but wanting in any sense of moral duties towards their ship’s company.  His lieutenant was of the same class, soured, moreover, by tardy promotion, and prejudiced against a gentleman-like, fair-faced lad, understood to have interest, and bearing a name that implied it.  Of the other two midshipmen, one was a dull lad of low stamp, the other a youth of twenty, a born bully, with evil as well as tyrannical propensities;—the crew conforming to severe discipline on board, but otherwise wild and lawless.  In such a ship a youth with good habits, sensitive conscience, and lack of moral or physical courage, could not but lead a life of misery, losing every day more of his self-respect and spirit as he was driven to the evil he loathed, dreading the consequences, temporal and eternal, with all his soul, yet without resolution or courage to resist.

As every one knows, the battle of Navarino came on suddenly, almost by mistake; and though it is perhaps no excuse, the hurly-burly and horror burst upon him at unawares.  Though the English loss was comparatively very small, the Clotho was a good deal exposed, and two men were killed—one so close to Clarence that his clothes were splashed with blood.  This entirely unnerved him; he did not even know what he did, but he was not to be found when required to carry an order, and was discovered hidden away below, shuddering, in his berth, and then made some shallow excuse about misunderstanding orders.  Whether this would have been brought up against him under other circumstances, or whether it would have been remembered that great men, including Charles V. and Henri IV., have had their moment de peur, I cannot tell; but there were other charges.  I cannot give date or details.  There is no record among the papers before me; and I can only vaguely recall what could hardly be read for the sense of agony, was never discussed, and was driven into the most oblivious recesses of the soul fifty years ago.  There was a story about having let a boat’s crew, of which he was in charge, get drunk and over-stay their time.  One of them deserted; and apparently prevarication ran to the bounds of perjury, if it did not overpass them.  (N.B.—Seeing seamen flogged was one of the sickening horrors that haunted Clarence in the Clotho.)  Also, when on shore at Malta with the young man whose name I will not record—his evil genius—he was beguiled or bullied into a wine-shop, and while not himself was made the cat’s-paw of some insolent practical joke on the lieutenant; and when called to account, was so bewildered and excited as to use unpardonable language.

Whatever it might have been in detail, so much was proved against him that he was dismissed his ship, and his father was recommended to withdraw him from the service, as being disqualified by want of nerve.  Also, it was added more privately, that such vicious tendencies needed home restraint.  The big bully, his corrupter, bore witness against him, but did not escape scot free, for one of the captains spoke to him in scathing tones of censure.

Whenever my mother was in trouble, she always re-arranged the furniture, and a family crisis was always heralded by a revolution of chairs, tables, and sofas.  She could not sit still under suspense, and, during these terrible days the entire house underwent a setting to rights.  Emily attended upon her, and I sat and dusted books.  No doubt it was much better for us than sitting still.  My father’s letter came by the morning mail, telling us of the sentence, and that he and our poor culprit, as he said, would come home by the Portsmouth coach in the evening.

One room was already in order when Sir John Griffith kindly came to see whether he could bring any comfort to a spirit which would infinitely have preferred death to dishonour, and was, above all, shocked at the lack of physical courage.  Never had I liked our old Admiral so well as when I heard how his chief anger was directed against the general mismanagement, and the cruelty of blighting a poor lad’s life when not yet seventeen.  His father might have been warned to remove him without the public scandal of a court-martial and dismissal.

‘The guilt and shame would have been all the same to us,’ said my mother.

‘Come, Mary, don’t be hard on the poor fellow.  In quiet times like these a poor boy can’t look over the wall where one might have stolen a horse, ay, or a dozen horses, when there was something else to think about!’

‘You would not have forgiven such a thing, sir.’

‘It never would have happened under me, or in any decently commanded ship!’ he thundered.  ‘There wasn’t a fault to be found with him in the Calypso.  What possessed Winslow to let him sail with Brydone?  But the service is going,’ etc. etc., he ran on—forgetting that it was he himself who had been unwilling, perhaps rightly, to press the Duke of Clarence for an appointment to a crack frigate for his namesake.  However, when he took leave he repeated, as he kissed my mother, ‘Mind, Mary, don’t be set against the lad.  That’s the way to make ’em desperate, and he is a mere boy, after all.’

Poor mother, it was not so much hardness as a wounded spirit that made her look so rigid.  It might have been better if the return could have been delayed so as to make her yearn after her son, but there was nowhere for him to go, and the coach was already on its way.  How strange it was to feel the wonted glow at Clarence’s return coupled with a frightful sense of disgrace and depression.

The time was far on in October, and it was thus quite dark when the travellers arrived, having walked from Charing Cross, where the coach set them down.  My father came in first, and my mother clung to him as if he had been absent for weeks, while all the joy of contact with my brother swept over me, even though his hand hung limp in mine, and was icy cold like his cheeks.  My father turned to him with one of the little set speeches of those days.  ‘Here is our son, Mary, who has promised me to do his utmost to retrieve his character, as far as may be possible, and happily he is still young.’

My mother’s embrace was in a sort of mechanical obedience to her husband’s gesture, and her voice was not perhaps meant to be so severe as it sounded when she said, ‘You are very cold—come and warm yourself.’

They made room for him by the fire, and my father stood up in front of it, giving particulars of the journey.  Emily and Martyn were at tea in the nursery, in a certain awe that hindered them from coming down; indeed, Martyn seems to have expected to see some strange transformation in his brother.  Indeed, there was alteration in the absence of the blue and gold, and, still more, in the loss of the lightsome, hopeful expression from the young face.

There is a picture of Ary Scheffer’s of an old knight, whose son had fled from the battle, cutting the tablecloth in two between himself and the unhappy youth.  Like that stern baron’s countenance was that with which my mother sat at the head of the dinner-table, and we conversed by jerks about whatever we least cared for, as if we could hide our wretchedness from Peter.  When the children appeared each gave Clarence the shyest of kisses, and they sat demurely on their chairs on either side of my father to eat their almonds and raisins, after which we went upstairs, and there was the usual reading.  It is curious, but though none of us could have told at the time what it was about, on turning over not long ago a copy of Head’s Pampas and Andes, one chapter struck me with an intolerable sense of melancholy, such as the bull chases of South America did not seem adequate to produce, and by and by I remembered that it was the book in course of being read at that unhappy period.  My mother went on as diligently as ever with some of those perpetual shirts which seemed to be always in hand except before company, when she used to do tambour work for Emily’s frocks.  Clarence sat the whole time in a dark corner, never stirring, except that he now and then nodded a little.  He had gone through many wakeful, and worse than wakeful, nights of wretched suspense, and now the worst was over.

Family prayers took place, chill good-nights were exchanged, and nobody interfered with his helping me up to my bedroom as usual; but there was something in his face to which I durst not speak, though perhaps I looked, for he exclaimed, ‘Don’t, Ned!’ wrung my hand, and sped away to his own quarters higher up.  Then came a sound which made me open my door to listen.  Dear little Emily!  She had burst out of her own room in her dressing-gown, and flung herself upon her brother as he was plodding wearily upstairs in the dark, clinging round his neck sobbing, ‘Dear, dear Clarry!  I can’t bear it!  I don’t care.  You’re my own dear brother, and they are all wicked, horrid people.’

That was all I heard, except hushings on Clarence’s part, as if the opening of my door and the thread of light from it warned him that there was risk of interruption.  He seemed to be dragging her up to her own room, and I was left with a pang at her being foremost in comforting him.

My father enacted that he should be treated as usual.  But how could that be when papa himself did not know how changed were his own ways from his kindly paternal air of confidence?  All trust had been undermined, so that Clarence could not cross the threshold without being required to state his object, and, if he overstayed the time calculated, he was cross-examined, and his replies received with a sigh of doubt.

He hung about the house, not caring to do much, except taking me out in my Bath chair or languidly reading the most exciting books he could get;—but there was no great stock of sensation then, except the Byronic, and from time to time one of my parents would exclaim, ‘Clarence, I wonder you can find nothing more profitable to occupy yourself with than trash like that!’

He would lay down the book without a word, and take up Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Smollett’s England—the profitable studies recommended, and speedily become lost in a dejected reverie, with fixed eyes and drooping lips.

CHAPTER V

A HELPING HAND