Telephones everywhere not only

destroyed privacy, but brought dismay into countless gentle intimacies,

their nuisance hardly justified by their usefulness. Life, it seemed,

in a frantic hurry, had been cheapened, not improved; there was no real

progress, but only more unrest. England—too solid to go fast, had made

ungainly efforts; but she had moved towards ungraciousness where she

had moved at all; I found her a cross between a museum and an American

mushroom town that advertises all the modern comforts with a violent

insistence that is meant to cloak their very absence.

This, my first impression, toned down, of course, a little later;

but it was my first impression. The people, however, even in the

countryside, seemed proud both of mushroom and museum, and commercial

ugliness, greedy and unashamed, now distorted every old-world village.

The natives were pleased to the point of vanity.

For myself, I could not manage this atrocious compromise, and

looking for the dear old England of our boyhood days, I found it not.

The change, of course, was not in the country only, but in myself. The

soul in me, awakened to a new standard, had turned round to face

another way.

The Manor House was very still when I arrived from London—& late

May evening between the sunset and the dark. Mother, as you know, met

me at the station, for they had stopped the down-train by special

orders, so that I stepped out upon the deserted platform of the

countryside quite alone, a distinguished man, with my rug and umbrella.

A strange footman touched his hat, an old, stooping porter stared hard

at me, then smiled vaguely, while the guard, eyeing respectfully the

individual for whom his train had halted, waved his red flag, and swung

himself into the disappearing van with the approved manner we once

thought marvellous. I left the empty platform, gave up my ticket to an

untidy boy, and crossed the gloomy booking-hall. The mournfulness of

the whole place was depressing. I heard a blackbird whistle in a bush

against the signal-box. It seemed to scream.

Mother I first saw, seated in the big barouche. She was leaning

back, but sat forwards as I came. She looked into my face across the

wide interval of years now ended, and my heart gave a great boyish

leap, then sank into stillness again abruptly. She seemed to me exactly

the same as usual—only so much smaller. We embraced with a kind of

dignity:

“So here you are, my boy, at last,” I heard her say in a quiet

voice, and as though she had seen me a month or two ago, “and very,

very tired, I’ll be bound.”

I took my seat beside her. I felt awkward, stiff, self-conscious;

there was disappointment somewhere.

“Oh, I’m all right, mother, thanks,” I answered. “But

how are you?” And the next moment, it seemed to me, I heard her

asking if I was hungry;— whereupon, absurd as it must sound, I was

aware of an immense emotion that interfered with my breathing. It broke

up through some repressive layer that had apparently concealed it, and

made me feel—well, had I been thirty-five years younger, I could have

cried— for pleasure. Mother, I think, forgot those years perhaps. To

her I was still in overalls and wanted food. We drove, then, in

comparative silence the four miles behind the big pair of greys, the

only remark that memory credits me with being an enquiry about the

identity of the coachman whose dim outline I saw looming in the

darkness just above me. The lamplight showed one shoulder, one arm, one

ear, the rest concealed; but the way he drove was, of course,

unmistakeable; slowly, more cautiously, perhaps, but with the same

flourish of the whip, the same air of untold responsibility as ever.

And, will you believe it, my chief memory of all that scene of

anticipated tenderness and home-emotion is the few words he gave in

reply to my enquiry and recognition when at length the carriage stopped

and I got out:

“Well, Brown, I’m glad to see you again. All well at

home, I hope?” followed by something of sympathy about his beloved

horses.

He looked down sideways at me from the box, touching

his cockade with the long yellow whip in his thick, gloved hand. I can

hear his warm, respectful answer now; I can see the gleam of proud

pleasure in his eye:

“Yes, sir, thank you, Sir Richard, and glad to see

you back again, sir, and with such success upon you.”

I moved back to help our mother out. I remember

thinking how calm, how solid, how characteristically inarticulate it

all was. Did I wish it otherwise? I think not. Only there was something

in me beating its wings impatiently like a wild bird that felt the bars

close round it….