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Page 28

"I read a whole chapter of it once," said Austin. "I can scarcely
believe it myself, but I did. It's the most immoral, sordid, selfish
book that was ever printed. It deifies Success--success in
money-making--success of the coarsest and most materialistic kind. It
is absolutely unspiritual and degrading. It nearly made me sick."

"Be silent!" cried Aunt Charlotte, horrified. "How dare you talk like
that? I will not sit still and hear you say such things. Few books
have had a greater influence upon the age. Degrading? Why, it's been
the making of thousands!"

"Thousands of soulless money-grubbers," retorted Austin. "That's what
it has made. Men without an idea or an aspiration above their horrible
spinning-jennies and account-books. I hate your successful
stockbrokers and shipowners and manufacturers. They are an odious
race. Wasn't it a stockjobber who thought Botticelli was a cheese?
Everyone knows the story, and I believe the hero of it was either a
stockjobber or a man who made screws in Birmingham."

Aunt Charlotte let her knitting fall on her lap in despair. "Austin,"
she said, in her most solemn tones, "I never regretted your poor
mother's death as I regret it at this moment."

"Why, auntie?" he asked, surprised.

"Perhaps she would have understood you better; perhaps she might even
have been able to manage you," replied the poor lady. "I confess that
you're beyond me altogether. Do you know what it was she said to me
upon her death-bed? 'Charlotte,' she said, 'my only sorrow in dying is
that I shall never be able to bring up my boy. Who will ever take such
care of him as I should?' You were then two days old, and the very
next day she died. I've never forgotten it. She passed away with that
sorrow, that terrible anxiety, tearing at her heart. I took her place,
as you know, but of course I was only a makeshift. I often wonder
whether she is still as anxious about you as she was then."

"My dearest auntie, you've been an angel in a lace cap to me all my
life, and I'm sure my mother isn't worrying herself about me one bit.
Why should she?" argued Austin. "I'm leading a lovely life, I'm as
happy as the days are long, and if my tastes don't run in the
direction of selling screws or posting ledgers, nothing that anybody
can say will change them. And I tell you candidly that if they were so
changed they would certainly be changed for the worse. I hate ugly
things as intensely as I love beautiful ones, and I'm very thankful
that I'm not ugly myself. Now don't look at me like that; it's so
conventional! Of course I know I'm not ugly, but rather the reverse
(that's a modest way of putting it), and I pray to beloved Pan that he
will give me beauty in the inward soul so that the inward and the
outward man may be at one. That's out of the 'Ph�drus,' you know--a
very much superior composition to 'Self Help.' So cheer up, auntie,
and don't look on me as a doomed soul because we're not both turned
out of the same melting-pot. Now I'm just going upstairs to see to the
arrangement of my new room, and then I shall go and help Lubin in the
garden."

So saying, he strolled out. But poor Aunt Charlotte only shook her
head. She could not forget how Austin's mother had grieved at not
living to bring up her boy, and wished more earnestly than ever that
the responsibility had fallen into other hands than hers. There was
something so dreadfully uncanny about Austin. His ignorance about the
common facts of life was as extraordinary as his perfect familiarity
with matters known only to great scholars. His views and tastes were
strange to her, so strange as to be beyond her comprehension
altogether. She found herself unable to argue with him because their
minds were set on different planes, and her representations did not
seem to touch him in the very least. And yet, after all, he was a very
good boy, full of pure thoughts and kindly impulses and spiritual
intuitions and intellectual proclivities which certainly no moralist
would condemn. If only he were more practical, even more commonplace,
and wouldn't talk such nonsense! Then there would not be such a gulf
between them as there was at present; then she might have some
influence over him for good, at any rate. Her thoughts recurred,
uneasily, to the strange experiences of that morning. The mystery of
the raps distracted her, puzzled her, frightened her; whereas Austin
was not frightened at all--on the contrary, he accepted the whole
thing with the serenest cheerfulness and _sang-froid_, finding it
apparently quite natural that these unseen agencies, coming from
nobody knew where, should take him under their protection and make
friends with him. What could it all portend?

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Sun 21st Dec 2025, 14:41

Austin and His Friends by Frederic H. Balfour