Wilfrid Cumbermede | Page 2

look poverty-stricken in his eyes, and he would no more claim
consideration for them than expect knighthood because he was no thief;
when he cares little for his reputation, but much for his character--little
for what has gone beyond his control, but endlessly much for what yet
remains in his will to determine; then, I think, a man may do well to
write his own life.
'So,' I imagine my reader interposing, 'you profess to have arrived at
this high degree of perfection yourself?'
I reply that the man who has attained this kind of indifference to the
past, this kind of hope in the future, will be far enough from
considering it a high degree of perfection. The very idea is to such a
man ludicrous. One may eat bread without claiming the honours of an
athlete; one may desire to be honest and not count himself a saint. My

object in thus shadowing out what seems to me my present condition of
mind, is merely to render it intelligible to my reader how an
autobiography might come to be written without rendering the writer
justly liable to the charge of that overweening, or self-conceit, which
might be involved in the mere conception of the idea.
In listening to similar recitals from the mouths of elderly people, I have
observed that many things which seemed to the persons principally
concerned ordinary enough, had to me a wonder and a significance they
did not perceive. Let me hope that some of the things I am about to
relate may fare similarly, although, to be honest, I must confess I could
not have undertaken the task, for a task it is, upon this chance alone: I
do think some of my history worthy of being told, just for the facts'
sake. God knows I have had small share of that worthiness. The
weakness of my life has been that I would ever do some great thing; the
saving of my life has been my utter failure. I have never done a great
deed. If I had, I know that one of my temperament could not have
escaped serious consequences. I have had more pleasure when a grown
man in a certain discovery concerning the ownership of an apple of
which I had taken the ancestral bite when a boy, than I can remember to
have resulted from any action of my own during my whole existence.
But I detest the notion of puzzling my reader in order to enjoy her
fancied surprise, or her possible praise of a worthless ingenuity of
concealment. If I ever appear to behave thus, it is merely that I follow
the course of my own knowledge of myself and my affairs, without any
desire to give either the pain or the pleasure of suspense, if indeed I
may flatter myself with the hope of interesting her to such a degree that
suspense should become possible.
When I look over what I have written, I find the tone so sombre--let me
see: what sort of an evening is it on which I commence this book? Ah!
I thought so: a sombre evening. The sun is going down behind a low
bank of grey cloud, the upper edge of which he tinges with a faded
yellow. There will be rain before morning. It is late Autumn, and most
of the crops are gathered in. A bluish fog is rising from the lower
meadows. As I look I grow cold. It is not, somehow, an interesting
evening. Yet if I found just this evening well described in a novel, I

should enjoy it heartily. The poorest, weakest drizzle upon the
window-panes of a dreary roadside inn in a country of slate-quarries,
possesses an interest to him who enters it by the door of a book, hardly
less than the pouring rain which threatens to swell every brook to a
torrent. How is this? I think it is because your troubles do not enter into
the book and its troubles do not enter into you, and therefore nature
operates upon you unthwarted by the personal conditions which so
often counteract her present influences. But I will rather shut out the
fading west, the gathering mists, and the troubled consciousness of
nature altogether, light my fire and my pipe, and then try whether in my
first chapter I cannot be a boy again in such fashion that my companion,
that is, my reader, will not be too impatient to linger a little in the
meadows of childhood ere we pass to the corn-fields of riper years.
CHAPTER I.
WHERE I FIND MYSELF.
No wisest chicken, I presume, can recall the first moment when the
chalk-oval surrounding it gave way, and instead of the cavern of
limestone which its experience might have led it