Invitation to Life

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the beginning there were tears—scalding drops that came with the vague tragedies of childhood. They left shiny runnels on his cheeks that smarted and burned.

There were tears when Peter, the golliwog, couldn’t be found; tears when he woke up at night and found himself so horribly alone in the vastness of his cot; tears when cook sang the sad song about the boy in blue who died on the battlefield; tears when the first remembered Christmas morning broke without those counterpanes of snow which stories and pictures had promised; tears when nurse announced that he was grown up at last and henceforth would walk of afternoons instead of being pushed in the perambulator. Saddest of all were the tears when Emily, the maid, scolded him for some vague sin and vowed she loved him no more. Not to be loved was misery-tragedy—and Tregan cried.

Pain of tears was alleviated on the day that Tregan discovered that the drops were salty. By putting out his tongue he could touch the runnels on his cheeks. The saline tang was piquant. This was the first time that warmth of profound discovery left only academic interest in woes. It wasn’t to be the last.

The deep and tearful sadnesses of infancy became less devastating as his faculties grew. He found it great fun to take clinical case-notes on the strange affairs in the life of Llewellyn Tregan. When he was taken to church for the first time, he was warned not to cry. He found nothing sad there. It was fun. Everyone sang—much louder than cook did in the kitchen. Even his father sang. His father never sang at home. He sang in church. That was strange. His father sang from behind his big moustache.

But on the way home Tregan cried. They were walking home, walking many miles—or so it seemed to Tregan with his short steps and long perspectives of childhood. It seemed sad to have a world so vast—such a terribly large and empty world. He cried. His father carried him. The memory always persisted, half-dimly—his father carrying him, the rough shoulder of a tweed coat scratching against his cheeks that smarted from the tears and the sea breeze, the pungent smell of the rough fabric. It was strange, the smell of that fabric. It became so all-absorbing that he forgot to cry any more. With his whole being entranced in the smell of tear-stained tweed, he fell asleep.

Later in life the picture of his father almost faded from his memory and finally there was little left but the intangible memory of a smell—a mixed smell of Russian leather and wet tweed impregnated with woodsmoke.

Many years later a girl gave him a Russian leather wallet. Whenever he carried it the curious odor welled over the floodgates of memory, stabbed vividly into the past and recalled a father who sang from behind his moustache in church.

There was almost the same childish impression of his mother—the smell of perfume as she bent over his cot late one night, the touch of a heavily dotted veil on his face as she kissed him.

“I don’t want to wake him,” she had said in a low voice to someone in the darkness.

Tregan, with the guile of a child, had pretended to be asleep. Later he wished he hadn’t. Soon after she was gone. He was told that she was dead.

Not long after that his father vanished from his small ken too. Tregan didn’t see him again for many years. His father was abroad. That was what his mother’s aunt told him sternly. He felt somehow that it was a terrible sin to have a mother dead and a father abroad.

Then both parents began to be part of the forgotten. There were letters from his father—epistles bearing large and strange postage stamps. Then his parents went entirely from his mind. He lived with his mother’s relatives and they were sufficient unto the day. Only very occasionally the disturbing thought half-smouldered in the back of his brain that there was something strange hanging over him.

As he grew up, all that died down and he began to discover many things. Very early he discovered that, as a Tregan, he was a little important in the village. He also discovered that his accent was different from that of the village boys about him. This he took as another mark of strangeness—something to be looked on with shame—so he tried to talk like the village boys and the housemaids. One day he used a dialectic word at the dinner table to which he had just been promoted. His great-uncle ordered him to the kitchen to eat with the servants. Tregan learned quickly. After that he spoke correctly at home; but once across the threshold he broadened his vowels and zoomed his sibilants to his heart’s content.

As he grew up his childhood in Devon became a halcyon affair. It was full of the glamour and mystery that a sensitive child can imbue into life. He peopled the countryside with pixies and smugglers. He read a story of American Wild West life. After that the tangled moor became a prairie, each cliff was a bluff, every spinney a trackless forest, all the gorse patches were cottonwood.

It was pleasant—childhood. Infancy had been tears over tragic reality; boyhood was the joy of escape. There were days in summer with the moor baking in the sun. He used to lie flat, his face pressed close to the earth. The rich smell of dry bracken would almost intoxicate him.

In the autumn there was the fog that swept up noisomely from the coast to bring the premature evenings. Then the windows would glow kindly through the mist, the sheep-bells would tinkle dolefully, far off a dog would bark, a mother would stand at her door in the village and call for her child, the boys would halloo to one another through the drifting curtains. It was a sweet interlude that lasted until grownups brought tragedy again. He was sent away to school.

At the village school he had been quite content. He had weltered in the comfort of being one of many instead of being a child among grownups. He had learned prisoner’s base, collected birds’ eggs, eaten raw turnips and fought sod fights. All this his mother’s relatives had viewed with alarm. They sent him away to a “gentleman’s school.”