Public-domain ebook
Language: en1,099 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
In: Bestsellers, American, 1895-1923·Novels·British Literature
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #46046.
Stephen McKenna’s Sonia: Between Two Worlds is a socially‑focused novel set against the backdrop of England in the years leading up to the First World War. The narrative opens with a reflective, almost essay‑like address in which the narrator, a former Oxford tutor, explains his intention to confine his story to the “governing classes” he has known for thirty years, rather than to attempt a sweeping history. He situates the first chapter in the summer of 1898 at Crowley Court, a sprawling Elizabethan mansion in Hampshire, and introduces the Dainton family, their daughter Sonia, and a circle of schoolboys whose lives intersect in the rituals of country‑house society, cricket, and the rituals of Melton School. The opening passages therefore establish a frame of personal reminiscence, a limited social sphere, and a temporal sweep that ends in August 1915, promising a portrait of relationships and class life as the world collapses into war.
The voice is that of a genteel, self‑conscious chronicler, blending a leisurely, descriptive style with occasional scholarly asides and a touch of dry humor. Written in the early twentieth‑century idiom, the prose reflects the period’s pre‑war sensibilities while hinting at the looming conflict. Readers who enjoy detailed character studies of the British upper‑middle class, nuanced explorations of friendships and family ties, and a narrative that balances social observation with a hint of historical inevitability will find the novel rewarding.
The opening · free to read
"I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves, and my shears, All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years. Only I cut on the timber, only I carved on the stone: 'After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known!'" RUDYARD KIPLING, "The Palace."
At the age of three-and-twenty Charles Templeton, my old tutor at Oxford, set himself to write a history of the Third French Republic. When I made his acquaintance some thirty years later he had satisfactorily concluded his introductory chapter on the origin of Kingship. At his death, three months ago, I understand that his notes on the precursors of Charlemagne were almost as complete as he desired. "It is so difficult to know where to start, Mr. Oakleigh," he used to say, as I picked my steps through the litter of notebooks that cumbered his tables, chairs and floor.
Magnis componere parva. I am sensible of a like difficulty in attempting to sketch for the benefit of an eight-weeks-old godson the outlines of a world that was clattering into ruins during the twelve months anterior to his birth. Even were I desirous of writing a social history of England for the last thirty years, I should be placing myself in competition with men more able and better equipped than I am to describe the politics, the diplomacy, the economics, the art and the social habits of the past generation. It is wiser to attempt nothing so comprehensive, but to limit myself to those facets of English life which I have been compelled--_nolens volens_--to study. Others will come after me to tell the story in its entirety; the utmost I attempt to record is circumscribed, personal reminiscence.
If, therefore, this book ever find favour in the eyes for which it was written, it will be because I have set narrow limits to my task and confined myself resolutely to those limits. For thirty years I have lived among what the world has agreed loosely to call "the Governing Classes." The title may already be obsolescent; sentence of proscription may, as I write, have been passed on those who bear it. At the lowest computation those classes will soon have changed beyond recognition in personnel, function, power and philosophy. This book may then perhaps have something of historical value in portraying a group of men and women who were at the same time my personal friends and representative of those Governing Classes in politics, journalism, commerce and society. I have drawn them as I saw them, without attempting to select or label predominant types. And if there be blank spaces on my canvas, it is to be remembered that I only set out to paint that social group with which I happened to be brought in contact.
Charles Templeton's difficulty in determining his initial date is in smaller degree my difficulty. I could give long introductory accounts of David O'Rane's wanderings before he reached England, or of Jim Loring's boyhood in Scotland, or the early phases of the Dainton fortunes. To do so, however, would involve a sacrifice of the unities of time and place; and when the work was done I should be left with the feeling that it would have been better done at first hand by O'Rane himself, or Lady Loring, or Sir Roger Dainton. It is equally difficult to know where the final line is to be drawn. Nearly a year has already passed since the events recorded in the last chapter, yet that same chapter brings no sort of finality to the career of O'Rane, and, should another hand care to use them, the materials for another volume are rapidly accumulating.
I place my first chapter in the late summer of 1898, my last in August 1915. Neither date has been arbitrarily chosen.
In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.
Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black, gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his appearance.
The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library, admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more arid than "The Sportsman," "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia, aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the rule was never relaxed.
In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on Mrs. Dainton's right hand--a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,--or indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"--imperturbable, dreamy, detached and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the rest of the microcosm--his parents and masters included--found him as enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There is nothing he cannot or will do"--as Villiers, the master of the Under Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.
At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me--a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant--a taciturn boy with a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.
The one member of the family not present was Sonia, the only daughter, who, in consideration of her eleventh birthday, had been allowed to stay up till a quarter to eight, but no later. I suppose the child got her looks from her mother, though by this time Mrs. Dainton was verging on stoutness, with a mottled skin and hair beginning to seem dry and lustreless. Sonia, with her velvety brown eyes, her white skin and her dark hair certainly owed nothing to her father, who was one of the most commonplace men I have ever met, whether in mind or appearance. Of medium height, with a weatherbeaten face and mouse-coloured hair, he was growing fleshy--with that uneven distribution of flesh that assails so many men of his age-and suggesting to an observer that eating and exercise were now moving in inverse ratio. I liked him then--as I like him still--but in looking back over seventeen years I find my regard mingled with a certain pathos; he was so ineffectual, so immature and of so uncritical a mind: above all, he was so grateful to anyone who would be polite to him in his own house.
The Entrance Examination at Melton took place the day before term, and in the afternoon Mrs. Dainton suggested that some of us should drive over to the school, inquire how Sam had fared and bring him back to Crowley Court for dinner. As the others were playing tennis, Sonia and I climbed into the high four-wheeled dogcart and were slowly driven by her father up the five-mile hill that separated us from the town.
Melton is one of those places that never change. In a hundred years' time I have no doubt it will present the same appearance of warm, grey, placid beauty as on that September afternoon, when we emerged from the Forest to find the school standing out against the setting sun like a group of temples on a modern Acropolis. Leaving the dogcart at the "Raven," we covered the last half mile on foot, and, while Dainton called on the Head, I took Sonia to Big Gateway and led her on a tour of inspection round the school. After seventeen years and for all its familiarity I can recall the beauty of the scene in its unwonted holiday desolation. Standing in the Gateway with our faces to the north, we had College to our right and the Head's house to our left; on the eastern, western and northern sides of the Great Court lay the nine boarding-houses, and through the middle of Matheson's, in line with Big Gateway, ran the Norman tunnel leading to Cloisters, Chapel and Great School.
It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk, and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.
The book keeps going
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
New illustrated classics
Once or twice a month: the latest books to get full character casts, scene art, and free comic editions. No account needed.
