Erewhon Revisited | Page 6

I may as well here inform the reader that I was born at the end of September 1871, and
was christened John, after my grandfather. From what I have said above he will readily
believe that my earliest experiences were somewhat squalid. Memories of childhood rush
vividly upon me when I pass through a low London alley, and catch the faint sickly smell
that pervades it--half paraffin, half black-currants, but wholly something very different. I
have a fancy that we lived in Blackmoor Street, off Drury Lane. My father, when first I
knew of his doing anything at all, supported my mother and myself by drawing pictures
with coloured chalks upon the pavement; I used sometimes to watch him, and marvel at
the skill with which he represented fogs, floods, and fires. These three "f's," he would say,
were his three best friends, for they were easy to do and brought in halfpence freely. The
return of the dove to the ark was his favourite subject. Such a little ark, on such a hazy
morning, and such a little pigeon--the rest of the picture being cheap sky, and still
cheaper sea; nothing, I have often heard him say, was more popular than this with his
clients. He held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some naivete that he
considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it out in such perishable fashion. "At
any rate," he would say, "no one can bequeath one of my many replicas to the nation."
I never learned how much my father earned by his profession, but it must have been
something considerable, for we always had enough to eat and drink; I imagine that he did
better than many a struggling artist with more ambitious aims. He was strictly temperate
during all the time that I knew anything about him, but he was not a teetotaler; I never

saw any of the fits of nervous excitement which in his earlier years had done so much to
wreck him. In the evenings, and on days when the state of the pavement did not permit
him to work, he took great pains with my education, which he could very well do, for as a
boy he had been in the sixth form of one of our foremost public schools. I found him a
patient, kindly instructor, while to my mother he was a model husband. Whatever others
may have said about him, I can never think of him without very affectionate respect.
Things went on quietly enough, as above indicated, till I was about fourteen, when by a
freak of fortune my father became suddenly affluent. A brother of his father's had
emigrated to Australia in 1851, and had amassed great wealth. We knew of his existence,
but there had been no intercourse between him and my father, and we did not even know
that he was rich and unmarried. He died intestate towards the end of 1885, and my father
was the only relative he had, except, of course, myself, for both my father's sisters had
died young, and without leaving children.
The solicitor through whom the news reached us was, happily, a man of the highest
integrity, and also very sensible and kind. He was a Mr. Alfred Emery Cathie, of 15
Clifford's Inn, E.C., and my father placed himself unreservedly in his hands. I was at
once sent to a first-rate school, and such pains had my father taken with me that I was
placed in a higher form than might have been expected considering my age. The way in
which he had taught me had prevented my feeling any dislike for study; I therefore stuck
fairly well to my books, while not neglecting the games which are so important a part of
healthy education. Everything went well with me, both as regards masters and
school-fellows; nevertheless, I was declared to be of a highly nervous and imaginative
temperament, and the school doctor more than once urged our headmaster not to push me
forward too rapidly--for which I have ever since held myself his debtor.
Early in 1890, I being then home from Oxford (where I had been entered in the preceding
year), my mother died; not so much from active illness, as from what was in reality a
kind of maladie du pays. All along she had felt herself an exile, and though she had borne
up wonderfully during my father's long struggle with adversity, she began to break as
soon as prosperity had removed the necessity for exertion on her own part.
My father could never divest himself of the feeling that he had wrecked her life by
inducing her to share her lot with his own; to say that he was stricken with remorse on
losing her is not