JUVENILIA
THE CURSE OF THE HORSE RACE
Chap I Betting
I bet you 500 pounds I’ll win. The speaker was Rupert a man of about 25 he had a dark bushy mistarsh and flashing eyes.
I shouldn’t trust to much on your horse said Tom for ineed he had not the sum to spear.
The race was to take place at ten the following moring
The next moring Tom took his seat in the grant stand while Rupert mounted Sally (which was his horse) with the others to wate for the pistol shot which would anounse the start.
The race was soon over and Rupet had lost. What was he to do could he do the deed? Yes I’ll kill him in the night, he thought.
Rupert crept stedfustly along with out a sound but as he drew his sword it squeeked a little this awoke Tom seasing a candle he lit it just at that moment Rupert struch and sent the candle flying
The candle lit the cuntain Rupert trying to get away tumbled over the bed Tom maid a dash for the dorr and cleided with a perlisman who had come to see what was the matter and a panic took place.
While Tom and the peliesman were escapeing through the door Rupert was adaping quite a diffrat methand of escape he puld the matris of the bed and hurld the it out of the window then jumped out he landed safe and sound on the matris then began to run for all he was worth now let us leave Rupert and turn to Tom and the peliesman as soon as they got out Tom told the peliesman what had hapend.
“See there he is” said Tom “We must folow him and take him to prizen” said the peliesman.
There’s no time to spere said Tom letts get horses said the peliesman so they bort horses and and galerpin in the direcion they had seen him go.
On they went aintil they were face to face with each other. the peliesman lept from his horse only to be stabed to the hart by Rupert then Tom jumped down and got Rupert a smart blow on the cheak.
This enraged Rupert thake that he shouted and made a plung but tom was too quick for him artfully dogeing the sword he brout his sword round on Rupert’s other cheak.
Just at that moment Ruper slashed killed the peliesmans horse then lept on Toms horse and galapt off.
Of cause then was no chance of catching him on foot so Tom walked to the nearest inn to stay the night but it was ful up he had to share with a nother man.
Thou Tom was yerry tired he could not sleep, their was something about the man he was he did not like he reminded him of some one he didnot know who. Sudnly he felt something moveing on the bed looking up he saw the man fully dressed just getting off the bed.
Now Tom could see that the mysteraous man was Rupert. Has he come to do a merder? Or has he only come to stay the night? thees were the thoughts that rushed throu Toms head he lay still to what Rupert would do first he opened a cubord and took out a small letter bag from this he took some thing wich made Toms blod turn cold it was a bistol Tom lept forward and seesed Rubert by the throught and flung him to the ground then snaching a bit of robe from the ground he bound Rupert hand and foot.
Then Tom drest himself then Tom took Rupert to the puliese cort Rupert was hung for killing the pulies man. I hope this story will be aleson to you never to bet.
FIDON’S CONFETION
Chapter I
Midnight boomed from the old clock tower and still the two men played on. Ralfe the eldest son of Gerald Cantonville had got in debt to a villainous money lender and in desperation had taken to gambling in a great efort to “raise the wind” all in vain on he played and still Baycraw won. Sudenly the door opened and in came a young boy of nineteen he had just left his public school carrying away nearly every cup at the sports. He was certainly not clever clever for he had never got any higher than the upper fifth “Hullo Ralfe still playing I should turn in” The elder brother looked up sharply “Get off to bed youngster” he growled and then returned to the game. Tom Cantonville shrugged his shoulders and went out with despair in his heart.
Baycraw tiptoed down stairs and opened the window a cold draft of air blew in. He wistled softly and a dark form was siluetted for a moment against the bleu without. Then came a soft thud and a wispered warning. Then silence. The two men Baycraw and Fidon crept up stairs and having opened the door Mr. Cantonville’s room switched on the light. The old man turned over binked and started only to find himself looking down the barrel of a “colt” revolver
“Make a sound and your a dead man” wispered Braycow
“Who are you” murmered the terrified man
“You know very well! You havn’t such a bad memory as all that. Come no think can’t remember a certain bank robery in which a certain Cargon figurgered, do you not recall what he said when you found him out eh? something about revenge? well I am he and this—Fidon at this moment broke off as Braycaw raising a knife plunged it down ward there was a strangled and stilness.
“This” continued Fidon “Is our revenge
Halfe past eight and stil no apearance of Mr. Cantonville. They began to get nervous he was always punctual. Tom went to see what it was. In a minute he staggered back white to the lips his hand on his fore head he reeled into a chair and lay their like one dead his breath coming in short gasps Ralfe ran to the side bord and returned with a liqure glass of brandy. Tom drunk it and sat up “He’s dead” he said “they bloods all over his chest. Mrs. Cantonville rushed up to the room followed by all the other. There lay Mr. Cantonville a knife embedded in his chest. “We’d better leave it as it is for the detectives to see” advised Ralfe Tom was already at the telephone and in ten minutes a car swung up the drive and a detective alighted. All this time Braycaw was sitting in the breakfast room puffing a segar but now he followed the detective to the scene of the crime. The detective bent out of the boddy and drew out the knife it was an Idian dagger which had belonged to Ralfe but which he had given as security to Braycaw on not being able to pay for the gambling. “Why” cried Barbarous his sister “That’s Ralfe’s knife”
the detective turned on Ralfe “Can you acount for this?” he demanded
“I think I can” said Braycaw stepping forward “He was in debt and he was heir to all his father’s property and money”
“You cad” cried Ralfe leaping forward but was brough up by the detectives revolver leveled at him
“Mr Ralfe Cantonville” he said dryly “you can make all your excuses in court untill then consider yourselfe under arest.”
Tom buried his face in his hands. He heard a click and saw Ralfe handcuffed. He turned and ran down stairs and buring his face in his hands sobbed like a child. Suddenly the door swung open and in walked Braycaw a cynical smile on his lips Tom leapt to his feet his eyes blazing “Rather unfortunate about your brother eh? what?” drawled Braycaw. Tom’s reply was a terific swing of his fist. Braycaw who was not a big man stagered back his hands on his face and colapsed on the floor. Tom turned on his heel and left the room leaving Braycaw in a heap on the ground with a broken nose.
Now what ever falts Fidon might have he was not a cad and upon hearing of Ralfes arrest he quicly resolved to turn kings evidence and so it was that at halfe past five that evening there was a knock at the door and a clean shaven made steped into the spaceous hall of Cantonville Chase. He was ushered into the drawing room where he found Tom dedjectedly trying to read. He came quickly to the point and told everything. Tom escitedly brought paper and pen and the confetion was written. Sudenly there came a report the smashing of glass and a cry from Fidon a small figure rushed in flung some thing on the ground and the whole room was full of smoke. Tom stagered to the window and let in a cool draft of night air. As smoke cleared away he saw Fidon lying with a bullet in his head and the precious confetion was gone. Then he heard the purr of a motor car outside he rushed only to see Braycaw in a motor disapearing outside he seize his bike and in a second was following. On and on they went in a mad chase the result of which would mean a mans life Tom drew his “Browning” revolver and fire into the darkness ahead he fired again and saw a jet of flame shoot out of the car, he had fired the petrol! the car lurched and swurved; a dark form lept from it. Tom jumped from his bike and seized Braycaw by the coat. A swift turn and Braycaw was gone leaving Tom holding the coat. But Tom could see in the light of the blazing car something that made his heart leap with joy-out of the pocket petruded the confetion. Ralfe was safe!
The light streamed in at the window and Tom sat up his first action was to feel under the pillow and a sigh of relief broke from his lips as he felt the paper but he must get on the trial was tomorro and he had a long way to go. He looked at the clockit was 10 o’clock in 24 hours the trial would take place. He dressed and after a hasty meal hurried to the station the train was waiting and he got in. Five minutes later the train had started and was just getting up steam when a bearded gentleman rushed up the platform and leapt at the train. With agility that did not suite his years he swung onto the footbord and so in to the window where Tom was seated. Having apologies for his strange entrance he settled down and to all apearances slept Tom looked him up and down and noticed he had a broken nose. He began to suspect something. He sliped his hand behind the visitor and pulled one of the locks and he saw it was a wig. Then he lept forward and seized the beared it came away in his hand revealing Braycaw who leapt at him. The two struggled feercly together for some time then as they realed against the door it gave and they fell out on the hill down which the roled until it came to are shere drop Tom lost contitiousness.
When Tom recovered his senses it was dark he felt in his pocett and struck a light he was lying on a bush petruding from the side. Braycaw had been caught in the bush also but by his neck and he lay dead Tom shuddered. But he had other thinks than a murderer’s fate to trouble his mind. In a few hours his brother would be tried and he must get there with the confetion. He looked about him and saw the only possible way to escape was by most dangerous and wll nigh imposiple climb. But he saw that if he was to save his brother he must act and act quicly slowly raised himselfe to a stanidng possition then he felt above him and gripped the rock above slowly he puled himselfe up and then he found himselfe looking into a cave. He then remembered that it was a sumuggler’s cave that led to the old inn. He made his way up and opened the trap door which opened into the inn yard he pulled himselfe up and then began the race against time he rushed to the station just as the train was starting and leapt to the footboard of the engin “Would you like to earn a five pound note and save a man’s life” he cried The man looked amazed “Then reach Sherborough before ten” that was all. The driver opened the throttle of the engine and she sped forward into the night.
Nine o’clock struck and Ralfe paced his sell restlesly He put his hand to his hot head “could it be true? or was only a dreadful nightmare?” he flung himselfe on the hard bench “What if the trial did go against him? hung” he shuddered there was one window in his sell a small grating he could not escape.
Ralfe clung to the rail of the box as one witness after another rose and then suddenly there staggered into the room a young man his colar undone his tie twisted and blood on his face a bandage round his head. it was Tom. It is needless to desscribe the whole trial. Let it be said only that Tom’s arival saved Ralfe who was aquitted “without a stain on his character. Now he has a pretty wife and two children and often on Autumn evening they sit round the fire never tiered of following with their father his adventures and those of his brother in the race against time to get Fidon’s confetion.
THE END
MULTA PECUNIA
Chapter I
Sir Alfred James, a great collector of books, one day chanced to look at an old volume which had the curious name of “Multa Pecunia,” which told him that under his house there was a cave in which was untold of wealth. He did not trouble to read any more, for he had heard the yarn before, and did not believe it.
When Tom came home, being Sir Alfred’s son, he was treated with great respect by the servants and therefore was allowed to go into every nook and corner of the house. He was in a little poky room one day, when he saw this carving “Multa Pecunia.” He stared for some time at the carving, when suddenly he remembered seeing a book in the library with the same title. Immediately he ran to the library and took out the catalogue. There he saw these words, “Multa Pecunia, shelf 7, place 13.” He was immediately at shelf 7, but place 13 was empty!
What could it mean? Why had the book gone? He was quite bewildered. “Jumping Golliwogs” cried Tom at last, “I must tell the Pater.” He left the room with the intention of going to tell his father about the mysterious disappearance of the old volume; perhaps his father had it, or—Hark! what was that! the rustling of stiff paper was audible. He was now quite close to Smith, the butler’s room. The door was open so he looked in. There he saw Smith leaning over the old volume deeply engrossed. Suddenly he got up and walked stealthily to the door. Then he walked off in the direction of the room with the carving. When he got there he pressed the letter “U” and immediately a little trap door opened which was about 17 by 13 inches. Into this crept Smith followed by Tom. The two crept along a passage, and stopped at the sight of a great granite door. “Smith! what does this mean?” cried Tom putting his hand on Smith’s collar. Smith fairly staggered when he saw Tom; in fact he simply lost his head, and flew at Tom’s throat. A tremendous fight ensued in which Tom with his knowledge of boxing gave him, gave Smith an “up shot” blow that fairly staggered him. But in the end weight won and Tom was knocked senseless to the ground: but Smith was not a fellow to leave him there, he carried him up the steps and laying him down at the door of the library, then closing the door of the secret cave, and putting back the old volume in the library as he found it, he went back to bed.
Sir Alfred came striding along the passage to the library when he suddenly stopped in utter astonishment. “Tom!” he gasped as he saw the boy’s pale face.
When Tom came to consciousness he found himself in a soft feather bed with a nurse at his bedside. “Ah! that’s good, he is conscious now” she whispered. “Why did Smith attack me? asked Tom feebly. “He’s delirious” said the nurse turning to the doctor, “I thought he would be after that fall, poor boy”; for the library being at the foot of a flight of steps, Sir Alfred and the nurse naturally thought he had fallen down them.
A long time had past and Tom had not been allowed to see anyone as he had concussion of the brain. At last he was allowed to see someone and nurse asked him who he would choose for his first visitor. “Smith” was the reply. In came Smith very shyly. Why did you fling me down on that stone” demanded Tom.
Now Smith was not usually a butler. He was really a professional thief and so he soon thought of what to say, so turning to the nurse he said “I think I had better go for the excitement of seeing anybody after such a long time of quiet has made him a bit mad,” with that he left the room.
Tom was quite well and able to run about the house, so he thought he would see Smith. Smith was not in his room, so Tom thought that he would go into the secret cave. He went to the old carving, pressed the letter “U,” immediately the same door opened. He went along the passage. Suddenly he stopped abruptly, for footsteps could be heard coming towards him. He crouched down waiting ready to spring. The footsteps came nearer and nearer. Tom could feel his heart thumping against his ribs. Suddenly appeared round the corner of the passage, Tom was on his in a minute and taken by surprise Smith was flung senseless to the ground. Tom was just getting up when he saw a piece of old parchment, he opened it and this is what he read—“I, Wilfred James have stolen these articles of great price from Queen Elizabeth. I could not keep the secret so I put my confidence in Sir Walter Raleigh who gave a hint about it to the great statesman Bacon, who told Queen Elizabeth. The troops of soldiers will be here in one hour and if they find the jewels I shall be locked in the Tower.” There the paper ended, so Tom began to look for the jewels, and found them in Smith’s pocket. Then putting Smith back on his bed he went to his father’s study and told Sir Alfred all the paper had said, and showed him the jewels.
The next day Sir Alfred gave Smith the “sack” and the day after he was found to be the worst thief that ever puzzled Scotland Yard and was arrested and sent to Dartmoor convict prison.
THE END
FRAGMENT OF A NOVEL
To myself,
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
to whose sympathy and
appreciation alone it owes its being,
this book is dedicated.
Dedicatory letter,
My dear Evelyn,
Much has been written and spoken about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.
Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school-boy, you were allowed to sit up with our elders in the “bookroom” after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.
And all this will be brought up against you. “Another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say, “one more nursery novel.” So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the “wordsmiths” jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.
Yourself,
Evelyn
I
Peter Audley awoke with “second bell” ringing dismally down the cloisters and rolling over in bed looked at his watch. Reassured that he had another five minutes before he need begin getting up, he pulled his rug up over his shoulders and lay back gazing contentedly down the dormitory, which was already stirring with the profoundly comforting sounds made by other people dressing. The splashing of the showers next door, the chipping of the thick crockery and the muttered oaths at backstuds accentuated the pleasure of the last minutes.
Early school was kept up practically all the year round at Selchurch, which took a certain pride in the gloom of these early mornings. Peter, however, had got his “privileges” which took away the bitterest sting of frantic punctuality and allowed him, after reporting to his form master, to sit out and work in his study.
With a heave he got out of bed and went to wash. The showers looked singularly uninviting but the water for the basins was stone cold—the furnaces were not lit until midday in March 1918—and with rising gloom he returned shivering and half dry to the dormitory. Some fanatic had opened one of the high Gothic windows and a cold gust of wind swept down the room. There was a chorus of protestastion and the window was closed. He dressed dully and leaving the dormitory at a few minutes past seven crossed the quad to “report.” Several fags, laden with books, dashed past him, trying desperately to avoid recognition by the prefect “taking lates.” His form master nodded to him and he turned on his heel and made for his study. The gravel was dark with fallen rain, the sky menacing with monstrous rough hewn clouds; over everything spread a fine, wet mist.
The handle of his study door was cold; he went in, kicked the door to and fell into an easy chair gazing round the tiny room. It was pleasant enough and he had spent considerable pains on it, but this morning it afforded him no pleasure.
The carpet was black—a burst of aestheticism which he had long regretted as it took a great deal of brushing and earned his study the name of the “coal cellar”—and the walls distempered a bluish grey. On them were hung four large Medici prints, the gift of his grandmother but his own choice; Botticelli’s Mars & Venus—he had had some difficulty over this with his house master, to whom a nude was indecent whether it came from the National Gallery or La Vie Parisienne—Beatrice d’Este, Rembrandt’s “Philosopher” and Holbein’s Duchess of Milan. These he liked either because they were very beautiful or because they gave an air of distinction which his friends’ Harrison Fishers and Rilette pictures lacked. The curtains, cushions on the window seat and table cloth were blue; the whole room was pleasantly redolent of the coffee of the evening before.
Peter, however, lay back staring gloomily at the grey block of class rooms opposite. It was Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon was the time chosen, as being the longest uninterrupted time in the week, for the uniform parade. He could just remember when, his first term, summer 1914, it had been the great social time of the week when tea was brewed and quantities of eclaires eaten, and now that he had grown to an age to have a study and enjoy these things, they were all blotted out and from two to six he would have to manoeuvre a section of sullen fags over the wet downs in some futile “attack scheme.”
He knew exactly what would happen. They would fall in on one of the quads and be inspected—that meant half an hours work with reeking brasso and s.a.p. cleaning his uniform and equipment. They would then march up to the downs and in a driving wind stand easy while the O.C. explained the afternoons work. Ordnance maps would be issued to all N.C.O.’s with which to follow the explanation; these always bulged with incorrect folding and flapped in the wind.
It was never considered sufficient for one company merely to come and attack the other; a huge campaign of which they formed a tiny part would have to be elaborated. A company would be the advanced guard of part of an army, which had landed at Littlehampton and was advancing upon Hasting, intending to capture important bridge heads on the local river on their way; B company, with white hat bands, would be a force set to hold the spur of the downs above the Sanatorium cooperating with hypothetical divisions on either flank, until another division could arrive from Arundel. Rattles would be issued to serve as Lewis guns and this game of make-believe would go on for three hours, with extreme discomfort to both sides, when whistles and bugles would sound and the corps form up again for a criticism of the afternoon’s work. They would be told that, when the parade was dismissed, all rifles were to be wiped over with an oily rag before being returned to the armoury and that all uniforms were to be back in the lockers before six o’clock. They would then dismiss, hungry, bad tempered and with only twenty minutes in which to change for Chapel.
He hated the corps and all the more now that he had to take it seriously. He was seventeen and a half; next year, if the war was still on, as it showed every sign of being, would see him fighting. It brought everything terribly near. He had learnt much of what it was like over there from his brother, but Ralf saw everything so abstractedly with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he was far more sensitive and temperamental. He was sure that he would not be able to stand it; Ralf had won the D.S.O. some months ago.
He collected his thoughts with a start and looked at his time table. He had to finish the chapter of Economics which he had left the evening before. The book was lying where he had tossed it and, like everything that morning, looked singularly uninviting. It was bound in a sort of greasy, limp, oil cloth, “owing,” a label half scraped off the back proclaimed, “to shortage of labour”; it was printed crookedly on a thin greyish paper with little brown splinters of wood in it; it was altogether a typical piece of wartime workmanship. He took it up with listless repulsion and began to read.
“From considerations of this nature,” he read, “which, while not true of every person, taken individually, are yet on the average true, it may be inferred, with approximate accuracy, that by adding to the wealth of the poor, something taken, by some recognised and legal process, from the wealth of the rich, while some dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction is inevitably caused, yet, provided that the poor be greater in number than the rich, the satisfaction is greater than the dissatisfaction. Inequality of wealth, insofar as…”
It was all ineffably tedious. He tossed the book on to the table in the corner and taking up a novel passed the next half hour in dissatisfied gloom.
II
The clock in the quad struck quarter to eight and voices and shuffling sounded across the gravel as the forms began emptying. The door of his study was burst open and Bellinger came in.
“Edifying spectacle of history specialist at work! Here have I been doing geography with the ‘door mouse’ for three mortal quarters of an hour, while you read low novels.”
Bellinger was in the army class, a cheery soul, athletic, vacant, with an obsession for clothes. This was the only subject about which he could talk; he was always perfectly dressed himself and had earned something of a reputation by it. People would bring him patterns of cloth and consult him when they were getting suits, which was complimentary, although they never took his advice. It was said of him that he had once cut the headmaster in London because he met him wearing a brown overcoat with evening dress.
Peter turned down the corner of his page—a pernicious habit even in a wartime “Outlines of Economics” of which he could never cure himself—and got up.
“Come across to hall, you silly old ass, and tell me the latest bulletins from Sackville Street.”
“Nothing doing,” said Bellinger with the self righteous gloom of one whose religion has been insulted and pulled at the points of his waistcoat, “nothing doing at all. It’s the curse of this infernal war. While all the best people are in uniform they don’t pay any attention to civilian fashions. Thank the Lord I shall be in khaki in a couple of months.”
They linked up and walked down to hall, Bellinger earnestly enlarging upon the advantages of the R.A.F. over the ordinary uniform.
When they arrived at the “pits-table,” where people with studies sat, a heated discussion was going on. The head, Peter gathered, had proposed to the Games Committee the night before that none of the house cups should be competed for until after the war and that the time saved should be devoted to more parades and longer digging upon the house potatoe plots. Cook, the captain of Lane’s, had apparently been the only one with the courage to hold out against him. Lane’s were certain to get the open football and stood a good chance for the Five Mile.
Beaton, a small science specialist, was voluble in the head’s defence.
“After all,” he was saying, “what effects has the war had on us here? We’ve had a little less food and coal, people have been leaving a little earlier, the young masters have gone and these antiquated old fools like Boyle have taken their places, parades have become a bit longer, but is this enough? Has anything been done to make us realize that we are in the middle of the biggest war in history?”
“Everything has been done,” said Peter, “to make school life excessively unpleasant—after you with the bread, please Travers—what little of the old life does remain, is what keeps it just tolerable. Good God, isn’t it bad enough for you. I pity the men who’ve come during the last year and know only this side of Selchurch. I hate school, now, and shall be only too glad to get away; why utterly spoil it for the ‘underschools’?”
“Yes,” said Travers a large, sad “historian” on the other side of the table, “You seem to be one of the maniacs who believe in making themselves wretched because other people are. It’s only by the misery of three quarters, that life can be even tolerable for a quarter of society. It’s unjust but it’s better than the whole show being miserable. It’s a fundamental principle of political science”—any particularly sweeping cynicism was a “fundamental principle” with Travers.
“My pater had that craze badly in 1914,” said Garth, a pleasant, spotty youth, next to Peter, “he dug up the tennis court to grow vegetables when there was plenty of waste ground behind the stable yard.”
“And the mater makes me wear old clothes,” said Bellinger, “because she thinks it looks bad to wear new ones in war time.”
“Everyone is quite imbecile about the war”—Travers loved dismissing subjects—“they don’t realize that it is a natural function of development. It’s a fundamental principle that society can only remain normal if it is decimated at regular periods.”
The “paper boy” came to the table. Every day it was the duty of one of the fags to fetch the house papers from the porter’s lodge, as soon as he came out of early school, and bring them up to hall. They were supposed to go to the people who had bought them at the “paper auction” at the beginning of term, but in practice they went first to the high table where the prefects sat with the housemaster; when they had made their choice, he took them to the “pits-table” and distributed what were left as he liked.
“Times, please” said Peter over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Audley, that’s gone.”
“All right, Morning Post. Thanks.”
He spread it out over the table and glanced down the columns. It was full of the usual war news (Peter wondered vaguely what they managed to put in the papers in peace time); there were rumours of preparations for a big German offensive, factious political questions in the house, pages of minor engagements in the East. He folded it and passed it on to Bellinger.
III
It was a gloomy morning; gloomy even for the Easter term 1918. For half an hour after breakfast he sat in his study cleaning his uniform; in chapel he could smell the cleaning stuff up his nails. After chapel he had to go in for a double period of European History. He went into school profoundly depressed.
The “historians” were now taken by one Boyle. He had been, until the outbreak of war, the headmaster of a prosperous preparitory school on the East coast and had lived a life of lucrative dignity, making himself agreeable to distinguished parents and employing a large and competent staff to do the teaching. For two years he had kept doggedly on, feeling that it would be a surrender to the barbarian enemy if he left, but the numbers steadily sank, until one night a bomb was actually dropped onto the gymnasium breaking every frame of glass in the house. Then he realized that he must give it up, “St. Pendred’s” was commandeered to house a garrison staff, and Mr. Boyle set about finding other employment. The head forced to choose between Mr. Boyle and a mistress, to his eternal discredit chose Mr. Boyle and in less than a year the Senior History Specialist Set had sunk from the intellectual mekka of the school to the haven which sheltered those who considered that the work they had had to do to pass the School Certificate absolved them from any further exertions, at any rate, while they were at Selchurch. Not that he was ragged—that would have been beneath the dignity of a Sixth Form set—They merely sat through his hours in complete apathy. His predecessor had been a young man fresh from Cambridge and had made his history extremely entertaining, they had held debates, read each other papers and discussed current politics, but now there were no Varsity scholarships, the battle clouds of France shut out all but the immediate future and no one had any particular motive for, or interest in, working. Mr. Boyle certainly had not and Youth, far from being the time of burning quests and wild, gloriously vain ideals beloved of the minor poets, is essentially one of languor and repose. Every hour he dictated notes, from a large leather bound note book, which most people took; every week he set an essay which several people wrote; every month he gave out a syllabus of books for out of school study, which nobody read. He asked for little and was content with far less but the Senior History Specialist set often seemed unsatisfactory even to Mr. Boyle.
He came into the class room smiling a dignified welcome all round, laid his note book on one side of the high oak desk, his mortar board on the other, and sat down smoothing out his gown.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he began in his usual formula, “What are we doing this morning? European history, isn’t it Travers? Thank you. Ah yes, well I don’t think we can do better than go on with our notes for a little. Now let me see where was it we had got to. Alberoni? Yes I see I have the place marked. The last thing I gave you was ‘willing to cede Sardinia to secure her nephew’s succession to the Duchy of Parma’ wasn’t it? Well then, head this ‘D. Alberoni’s third coalition.’” For two hours he dictated an essay on XVIIth diplomacy.
Peter had reduced the taking of notes to an entirely subconscious exercise. He could now sit schooled by long practice, with his mind completely blank or filled with other things while his pen wrote out pages of notes industriously and quite correctly. Sometimes he would be woken from his reverie by a pause over some proper name, but often on looking them through he would find names which he had no recollection of having heard before. He sat writing out,
“… invited ‘pretender’ to Spain and arranged with Görz a northern alliance with Sweden and Russia to support the Stuart claims, while at the same time he entered into correspondence with Polignac and the Duchess of Main, to overthrow the Regency. The death of Charles XII, however…..”
Mr. Boyle’s notes did not elucidate any difficult problems or sift the important facts of history from the trivial. They merely stated things in direct paraphrase of Lodge; for the whole double period Peter steadily took them down.
At last the clock chimed and Mr. Boyle stood up, shut his note book and took up his mortar board. “That will be enough for this morning, I think. Remember that I want the essays on ‘The Freedom of the civilized State’ by Monday evening, without fail this time please. I will ask you to read up Catherine the Great for next Tuesday, if you will—I recommend Lecky. Thank you, good morning.”
Wearily they filed out for break. In the war time efficiency mania P.T. had been innovated which effectually took up all the break—ten minutes in which to change and twenty minutes drill. Peter hurried to the changing room and began undressing; he suddenly remembered that he had broken the lace of his gym shoe the day before. He succeeded in borrowing another and then realized that he had forgotten to get a new hat for parade as he had been told to last time. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him this morning.
“You never lose a stud but you lose the lot,” sighed Bellinger, “Hullo, what the devil does he want.”
Peter looked round and saw the porter’s burly figure framed in the doorway.
“Telegram for Mr. Audley, sir.”
“Hullo, what?” Peter tore open the orange envelope and hurriedly took out the telegram; it was getting late for P.T.
“Ralf on leave,” it ran, “return home wiring head will meet 4:52 Bulfrey.”
IV
One of the awfully clever things that Ralf had said was that life should be divided into water tight compartments and that no group of friends or manner of living should be allowed to encroach upon any other. Peter lay back and compared the day with the prospects early that morning.
As soon as he had got the telegram he had put on his shoes and told the porter to ’phone for a taxi. After a frantic search for his house master and an incoherent but convincing explanation to him and a hurried interview with the matron about his bag, he had managed to get away in time to catch the 11:12 to Victoria. There he had had a hasty but excellent lunch at the Grosvenor and had dashed across to Paddington and got into the train just as it was starting.
He now had a clear two hours run to Bulfrey. He lay back and took a cigarette from the box he had bought at lunch. Very contentedly he watched the telegraph wires rising falling and recrossing each other, mile after mile.
He had not had time in the rush of half packed pyjamas, moving trains and lost tickets, to think of what it all meant; now in the empty first class carriage with magazines and cigarettes he began to shake off the shadows of the prison house. He looked at his watch. At the very time that he was swaying into the country through the short wayside stations, Bellinger and Beaton and Garth and everyone else with whose lives his own had seemed so inextricably bound that morning were marching about on the downs. It was very cold at Selchurch, he reflected and the sea mist was lying in the valleys; he was warm with the close atmosphere of the carriage and the glass of port he had had after lunch and with a deep inward content.
Mile succeeded mile through the avenue of telegraph poles. Outside the weather was clearing up and a bright cool sun came out. He watched the fields reeling by and began to pass the landmarks which had grown familiar through many home comings, an imposing patent medicine factory, the neat beds of a large market garden, an Elizabethan farmhouse.
He wondered how long this unexpected holiday was going to last; he supposed about four days. This was really the first time that Ralf had made any mark in his life; he was five years older and had always kept himself very much aloof. They had had many quarrels as brothers always have. At times Ralf had been almost a prig, particularly when he was head of the house at Selchurch, and his first year at Oxford. Anyway it was through him that Peter was now sitting in comfort instead of marching his section up a wet hill in “blob” formation, and in the warmth of heart that can come only from physical comfort, Peter prepared to be very gracious towards his brother.
At last the train slowed to a stop and stood panting but unexhausted like a well-trained runner. Peter suddenly realized that they had reached Bulfrey. He snatched up his hat and bag, buttoned his coat and leapt onto the platform. Ralf was striding down towards him.
Peter had seen him in uniform before but then it had been with the timid pride of a 1914 subaltern. Now after three years fighting he looked wonderfully fit and hansome. A slanting ray of sunlight lit up his fair hair; he was wearing no cap.
“Hullo, Peter,” he cried, shaking hands, “we were afraid that you mightn’t be able to get the train. I suppose you’ve had lunch?”
“Yes thanks, I managed to get some in town. Pretty fair rush though. Hold on a second while I find my ticket.” He handed Ralf his bag and began exploring his pockets. Finding it, at last, between the leaves of his school “blue-book,” he gave it to the collector and taking back his bag followed his brother out.
“Is that all the luggage you’ve got?” he asked, “That’s splendid; we shall be able to bring it up with us now. I’ve got the dog-cart outside. Moira’s looking after it. She was coming into Bulfrey to do some shopping so I asked her to come and meet you.”
Moira Gage was the daughter of the vicar of Bulfrey Combe. Peter’s age, she and her brother had been the constant companions of the Audley boys before they went to school. They had seen less of each other as they grew up, Chris had gone to Winchester, Ralf and Peter to Selchurch, but the Vicarage was next door to the Hall and they had seen a good deal of each other in the holidays. Their fathers were close friends.
“Good work, I was afraid she would be away doing that V.A.D. work. I only saw her once all last holidays. Ah there she is.”
They had come out into the small station yard. On the other side of it stood the dog-cart and in it stood Moira Gage, one hand holding the reins, the other shading her eyes. She was tall, slim and pale, not really pretty but graceful and attractive; from a distance she looked like a Shepperson drawing but when you got nearer you saw depths in her grey, scrutable eyes, which his charming mannerisms could never convey; she was dressed in a tweed coat and a skirt with a grey silk scarf over her shoulders. Peter ran forward and greeted her.
“Peter,” she said, “before you do anything else, do make Ralf put his hat on. He looks simply dreadful and I’m sure he’d be court-martialled or something, if anyone saw.”
“Three years of military life shatter any illusions about military discipline,” Ralf replied, climbing up into the dog-cart, “the only hardened militarist nowadays is the newly conscripted civilian.”
“Now he’s being clever again,” Moira laughed, “I really thought you lost that when you came down from Oxford. Among other things, it’s very bad manners when you are in stupid company.”
“Thank you,” Peter expostulated, “I wish you’d speak for yourself. I’m in the sixth now and write essays on industrial history and all sorts of things.”
“You seem to regard your history with most unreasonable pride,” said Moira, “from all I hear it sounds only slack.”
“All pride is unreasonable” said Ralf. To Peter it seemed that he had paused a moment hesitating whether “no pride is unreasonable” was the more impressive; he had long gone beyond the stage when a sweeping generalization could pass as an epigram.
“The aphorisms of a disappointed man,” said Moira. “The next remark like that Ralf and I get out and walk.”
Bulfrey Combe was a mile and a half out from Bulfrey and still kept most of the appearance of a country village. Bulfrey was a small town with two or three streets of cheap shops, a bank, and a small glass factory which formed the nucleus of a large area of slums which was gradually spreading its grimy tentacles along the roads into the
To myself,
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
to whose sympathy and
appreciation alone it owes its being,
this book is dedicated.
Dedicatory letter,
My dear Evelyn,
Much has been written and spoken about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.
Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school-boy, you were allowed to sit up with our elders in the “bookroom” after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.
And all this will be brought up against you. “Another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say, “one more nursery novel.” So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the “wordsmiths” jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.
Yourself,
Evelyn
I
Peter Audley awoke with “second bell” ringing dismally down the cloisters and rolling over in bed looked at his watch. Reassured that he had another five minutes before he need begin getting up, he pulled his rug up over his shoulders and lay back gazing contentedly down the dormitory, which was already stirring with the profoundly comforting sounds made by other people dressing. The splashing of the showers next door, the chipping of the thick crockery and the muttered oaths at backstuds accentuated the pleasure of the last minutes.
Early school was kept up practically all the year round at Selchurch, which took a certain pride in the gloom of these early mornings. Peter, however, had got his “privileges” which took away the bitterest sting of frantic punctuality and allowed him, after reporting to his form master, to sit out and work in his study.
With a heave he got out of bed and went to wash. The showers looked singularly uninviting but the water for the basins was stone cold—the furnaces were not lit until midday in March 1918—and with rising gloom he returned shivering and half dry to the dormitory. Some fanatic had opened one of the high Gothic windows and a cold gust of wind swept down the room. There was a chorus of protestastion and the window was closed. He dressed dully and leaving the dormitory at a few minutes past seven crossed the quad to “report.” Several fags, laden with books, dashed past him, trying desperately to avoid recognition by the prefect “taking lates.” His form master nodded to him and he turned on his heel and made for his study. The gravel was dark with fallen rain, the sky menacing with monstrous rough hewn clouds; over everything spread a fine, wet mist.
The handle of his study door was cold; he went in, kicked the door to and fell into an easy chair gazing round the tiny room. It was pleasant enough and he had spent considerable pains on it, but this morning it afforded him no pleasure.
The carpet was black—a burst of aestheticism which he had long regretted as it took a great deal of brushing and earned his study the name of the “coal cellar”—and the walls distempered a bluish grey. On them were hung four large Medici prints, the gift of his grandmother but his own choice; Botticelli’s Mars & Venus—he had had some difficulty over this with his house master, to whom a nude was indecent whether it came from the National Gallery or La Vie Parisienne—Beatrice d’Este, Rembrandt’s “Philosopher” and Holbein’s Duchess of Milan. These he liked either because they were very beautiful or because they gave an air of distinction which his friends’ Harrison Fishers and Rilette pictures lacked. The curtains, cushions on the window seat and table cloth were blue; the whole room was pleasantly redolent of the coffee of the evening before.
Peter, however, lay back staring gloomily at the grey block of class rooms opposite. It was Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon was the time chosen, as being the longest uninterrupted time in the week, for the uniform parade. He could just remember when, his first term, summer 1914, it had been the great social time of the week when tea was brewed and quantities of eclaires eaten, and now that he had grown to an age to have a study and enjoy these things, they were all blotted out and from two to six he would have to manoeuvre a section of sullen fags over the wet downs in some futile “attack scheme.”
He knew exactly what would happen. They would fall in on one of the quads and be inspected—that meant half an hours work with reeking brasso and s.a.p. cleaning his uniform and equipment. They would then march up to the downs and in a driving wind stand easy while the O.C. explained the afternoons work. Ordnance maps would be issued to all N.C.O.’s with which to follow the explanation; these always bulged with incorrect folding and flapped in the wind.
It was never considered sufficient for one company merely to come and attack the other; a huge campaign of which they formed a tiny part would have to be elaborated. A company would be the advanced guard of part of an army, which had landed at Littlehampton and was advancing upon Hasting, intending to capture important bridge heads on the local river on their way; B company, with white hat bands, would be a force set to hold the spur of the downs above the Sanatorium cooperating with hypothetical divisions on either flank, until another division could arrive from Arundel. Rattles would be issued to serve as Lewis guns and this game of make-believe would go on for three hours, with extreme discomfort to both sides, when whistles and bugles would sound and the corps form up again for a criticism of the afternoon’s work. They would be told that, when the parade was dismissed, all rifles were to be wiped over with an oily rag before being returned to the armoury and that all uniforms were to be back in the lockers before six o’clock. They would then dismiss, hungry, bad tempered and with only twenty minutes in which to change for Chapel.
He hated the corps and all the more now that he had to take it seriously. He was seventeen and a half; next year, if the war was still on, as it showed every sign of being, would see him fighting. It brought everything terribly near. He had learnt much of what it was like over there from his brother, but Ralf saw everything so abstractedly with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he was far more sensitive and temperamental. He was sure that he would not be able to stand it; Ralf had won the D.S.O. some months ago.
He collected his thoughts with a start and looked at his time table. He had to finish the chapter of Economics which he had left the evening before. The book was lying where he had tossed it and, like everything that morning, looked singularly uninviting. It was bound in a sort of greasy, limp, oil cloth, “owing,” a label half scraped off the back proclaimed, “to shortage of labour”; it was printed crookedly on a thin greyish paper with little brown splinters of wood in it; it was altogether a typical piece of wartime workmanship. He took it up with listless repulsion and began to read.
“From considerations of this nature,” he read, “which, while not true of every person, taken individually, are yet on the average true, it may be inferred, with approximate accuracy, that by adding to the wealth of the poor, something taken, by some recognised and legal process, from the wealth of the rich, while some dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction is inevitably caused, yet, provided that the poor be greater in number than the rich, the satisfaction is greater than the dissatisfaction. Inequality of wealth, insofar as…”
It was all ineffably tedious. He tossed the book on to the table in the corner and taking up a novel passed the next half hour in dissatisfied gloom.
II
The clock in the quad struck quarter to eight and voices and shuffling sounded across the gravel as the forms began emptying. The door of his study was burst open and Bellinger came in.
“Edifying spectacle of history specialist at work! Here have I been doing geography with the ‘door mouse’ for three mortal quarters of an hour, while you read low novels.”
Bellinger was in the army class, a cheery soul, athletic, vacant, with an obsession for clothes. This was the only subject about which he could talk; he was always perfectly dressed himself and had earned something of a reputation by it. People would bring him patterns of cloth and consult him when they were getting suits, which was complimentary, although they never took his advice. It was said of him that he had once cut the headmaster in London because he met him wearing a brown overcoat with evening dress.
Peter turned down the corner of his page—a pernicious habit even in a wartime “Outlines of Economics” of which he could never cure himself—and got up.
“Come across to hall, you silly old ass, and tell me the latest bulletins from Sackville Street.”
“Nothing doing,” said Bellinger with the self righteous gloom of one whose religion has been insulted and pulled at the points of his waistcoat, “nothing doing at all. It’s the curse of this infernal war. While all the best people are in uniform they don’t pay any attention to civilian fashions. Thank the Lord I shall be in khaki in a couple of months.”
They linked up and walked down to hall, Bellinger earnestly enlarging upon the advantages of the R.A.F. over the ordinary uniform.
When they arrived at the “pits-table,” where people with studies sat, a heated discussion was going on. The head, Peter gathered, had proposed to the Games Committee the night before that none of the house cups should be competed for until after the war and that the time saved should be devoted to more parades and longer digging upon the house potatoe plots. Cook, the captain of Lane’s, had apparently been the only one with the courage to hold out against him. Lane’s were certain to get the open football and stood a good chance for the Five Mile.
Beaton, a small science specialist, was voluble in the head’s defence.
“After all,” he was saying, “what effects has the war had on us here? We’ve had a little less food and coal, people have been leaving a little earlier, the young masters have gone and these antiquated old fools like Boyle have taken their places, parades have become a bit longer, but is this enough? Has anything been done to make us realize that we are in the middle of the biggest war in history?”
“Everything has been done,” said Peter, “to make school life excessively unpleasant—after you with the bread, please Travers—what little of the old life does remain, is what keeps it just tolerable. Good God, isn’t it bad enough for you. I pity the men who’ve come during the last year and know only this side of Selchurch. I hate school, now, and shall be only too glad to get away; why utterly spoil it for the ‘underschools’?”
“Yes,” said Travers a large, sad “historian” on the other side of the table, “You seem to be one of the maniacs who believe in making themselves wretched because other people are. It’s only by the misery of three quarters, that life can be even tolerable for a quarter of society. It’s unjust but it’s better than the whole show being miserable. It’s a fundamental principle of political science”—any particularly sweeping cynicism was a “fundamental principle” with Travers.
“My pater had that craze badly in 1914,” said Garth, a pleasant, spotty youth, next to Peter, “he dug up the tennis court to grow vegetables when there was plenty of waste ground behind the stable yard.”
“And the mater makes me wear old clothes,” said Bellinger, “because she thinks it looks bad to wear new ones in war time.”
“Everyone is quite imbecile about the war”—Travers loved dismissing subjects—“they don’t realize that it is a natural function of development. It’s a fundamental principle that society can only remain normal if it is decimated at regular periods.”
The “paper boy” came to the table. Every day it was the duty of one of the fags to fetch the house papers from the porter’s lodge, as soon as he came out of early school, and bring them up to hall. They were supposed to go to the people who had bought them at the “paper auction” at the beginning of term, but in practice they went first to the high table where the prefects sat with the housemaster; when they had made their choice, he took them to the “pits-table” and distributed what were left as he liked.
“Times, please” said Peter over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Audley, that’s gone.”
“All right, Morning Post. Thanks.”
He spread it out over the table and glanced down the columns. It was full of the usual war news (Peter wondered vaguely what they managed to put in the papers in peace time); there were rumours of preparations for a big German offensive, factious political questions in the house, pages of minor engagements in the East. He folded it and passed it on to Bellinger.
III
It was a gloomy morning; gloomy even for the Easter term 1918. For half an hour after breakfast he sat in his study cleaning his uniform; in chapel he could smell the cleaning stuff up his nails. After chapel he had to go in for a double period of European History. He went into school profoundly depressed.
The “historians” were now taken by one Boyle. He had been, until the outbreak of war, the headmaster of a prosperous preparitory school on the East coast and had lived a life of lucrative dignity, making himself agreeable to distinguished parents and employing a large and competent staff to do the teaching. For two years he had kept doggedly on, feeling that it would be a surrender to the barbarian enemy if he left, but the numbers steadily sank, until one night a bomb was actually dropped onto the gymnasium breaking every frame of glass in the house. Then he realized that he must give it up, “St. Pendred’s” was commandeered to house a garrison staff, and Mr. Boyle set about finding other employment. The head forced to choose between Mr. Boyle and a mistress, to his eternal discredit chose Mr. Boyle and in less than a year the Senior History Specialist Set had sunk from the intellectual mekka of the school to the haven which sheltered those who considered that the work they had had to do to pass the School Certificate absolved them from any further exertions, at any rate, while they were at Selchurch. Not that he was ragged—that would have been beneath the dignity of a Sixth Form set—They merely sat through his hours in complete apathy. His predecessor had been a young man fresh from Cambridge and had made his history extremely entertaining, they had held debates, read each other papers and discussed current politics, but now there were no Varsity scholarships, the battle clouds of France shut out all but the immediate future and no one had any particular motive for, or interest in, working. Mr. Boyle certainly had not and Youth, far from being the time of burning quests and wild, gloriously vain ideals beloved of the minor poets, is essentially one of languor and repose. Every hour he dictated notes, from a large leather bound note book, which most people took; every week he set an essay which several people wrote; every month he gave out a syllabus of books for out of school study, which nobody read. He asked for little and was content with far less but the Senior History Specialist set often seemed unsatisfactory even to Mr. Boyle.
He came into the class room smiling a dignified welcome all round, laid his note book on one side of the high oak desk, his mortar board on the other, and sat down smoothing out his gown.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he began in his usual formula, “What are we doing this morning? European history, isn’t it Travers? Thank you. Ah yes, well I don’t think we can do better than go on with our notes for a little. Now let me see where was it we had got to. Alberoni? Yes I see I have the place marked. The last thing I gave you was ‘willing to cede Sardinia to secure her nephew’s succession to the Duchy of Parma’ wasn’t it? Well then, head this ‘D. Alberoni’s third coalition.’” For two hours he dictated an essay on XVIIth diplomacy.
Peter had reduced the taking of notes to an entirely subconscious exercise. He could now sit schooled by long practice, with his mind completely blank or filled with other things while his pen wrote out pages of notes industriously and quite correctly. Sometimes he would be woken from his reverie by a pause over some proper name, but often on looking them through he would find names which he had no recollection of having heard before. He sat writing out,
“… invited ‘pretender’ to Spain and arranged with Görz a northern alliance with Sweden and Russia to support the Stuart claims, while at the same time he entered into correspondence with Polignac and the Duchess of Main, to overthrow the Regency. The death of Charles XII, however…..”
Mr. Boyle’s notes did not elucidate any difficult problems or sift the important facts of history from the trivial. They merely stated things in direct paraphrase of Lodge; for the whole double period Peter steadily took them down.
At last the clock chimed and Mr. Boyle stood up, shut his note book and took up his mortar board. “That will be enough for this morning, I think. Remember that I want the essays on ‘The Freedom of the civilized State’ by Monday evening, without fail this time please. I will ask you to read up Catherine the Great for next Tuesday, if you will—I recommend Lecky. Thank you, good morning.”
Wearily they filed out for break. In the war time efficiency mania P.T. had been innovated which effectually took up all the break—ten minutes in which to change and twenty minutes drill. Peter hurried to the changing room and began undressing; he suddenly remembered that he had broken the lace of his gym shoe the day before. He succeeded in borrowing another and then realized that he had forgotten to get a new hat for parade as he had been told to last time. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him this morning.
“You never lose a stud but you lose the lot,” sighed Bellinger, “Hullo, what the devil does he want.”
Peter looked round and saw the porter’s burly figure framed in the doorway.
“Telegram for Mr. Audley, sir.”
“Hullo, what?” Peter tore open the orange envelope and hurriedly took out the telegram; it was getting late for P.T.
“Ralf on leave,” it ran, “return home wiring head will meet 4:52 Bulfrey.”
IV
One of the awfully clever things that Ralf had said was that life should be divided into water tight compartments and that no group of friends or manner of living should be allowed to encroach upon any other. Peter lay back and compared the day with the prospects early that morning.
As soon as he had got the telegram he had put on his shoes and told the porter to ’phone for a taxi. After a frantic search for his house master and an incoherent but convincing explanation to him and a hurried interview with the matron about his bag, he had managed to get away in time to catch the 11:12 to Victoria. There he had had a hasty but excellent lunch at the Grosvenor and had dashed across to Paddington and got into the train just as it was starting.
He now had a clear two hours run to Bulfrey. He lay back and took a cigarette from the box he had bought at lunch. Very contentedly he watched the telegraph wires rising falling and recrossing each other, mile after mile.
He had not had time in the rush of half packed pyjamas, moving trains and lost tickets, to think of what it all meant; now in the empty first class carriage with magazines and cigarettes he began to shake off the shadows of the prison house. He looked at his watch. At the very time that he was swaying into the country through the short wayside stations, Bellinger and Beaton and Garth and everyone else with whose lives his own had seemed so inextricably bound that morning were marching about on the downs. It was very cold at Selchurch, he reflected and the sea mist was lying in the valleys; he was warm with the close atmosphere of the carriage and the glass of port he had had after lunch and with a deep inward content.
Mile succeeded mile through the avenue of telegraph poles. Outside the weather was clearing up and a bright cool sun came out. He watched the fields reeling by and began to pass the landmarks which had grown familiar through many home comings, an imposing patent medicine factory, the neat beds of a large market garden, an Elizabethan farmhouse.
He wondered how long this unexpected holiday was going to last; he supposed about four days. This was really the first time that Ralf had made any mark in his life; he was five years older and had always kept himself very much aloof. They had had many quarrels as brothers always have. At times Ralf had been almost a prig, particularly when he was head of the house at Selchurch, and his first year at Oxford. Anyway it was through him that Peter was now sitting in comfort instead of marching his section up a wet hill in “blob” formation, and in the warmth of heart that can come only from physical comfort, Peter prepared to be very gracious towards his brother.
At last the train slowed to a stop and stood panting but unexhausted like a well-trained runner. Peter suddenly realized that they had reached Bulfrey. He snatched up his hat and bag, buttoned his coat and leapt onto the platform. Ralf was striding down towards him.
Peter had seen him in uniform before but then it had been with the timid pride of a 1914 subaltern. Now after three years fighting he looked wonderfully fit and hansome. A slanting ray of sunlight lit up his fair hair; he was wearing no cap.
“Hullo, Peter,” he cried, shaking hands, “we were afraid that you mightn’t be able to get the train. I suppose you’ve had lunch?”
“Yes thanks, I managed to get some in town. Pretty fair rush though. Hold on a second while I find my ticket.” He handed Ralf his bag and began exploring his pockets. Finding it, at last, between the leaves of his school “blue-book,” he gave it to the collector and taking back his bag followed his brother out.
“Is that all the luggage you’ve got?” he asked, “That’s splendid; we shall be able to bring it up with us now. I’ve got the dog-cart outside. Moira’s looking after it. She was coming into Bulfrey to do some shopping so I asked her to come and meet you.”
Moira Gage was the daughter of the vicar of Bulfrey Combe. Peter’s age, she and her brother had been the constant companions of the Audley boys before they went to school. They had seen less of each other as they grew up, Chris had gone to Winchester, Ralf and Peter to Selchurch, but the Vicarage was next door to the Hall and they had seen a good deal of each other in the holidays. Their fathers were close friends.
“Good work, I was afraid she would be away doing that V.A.D. work. I only saw her once all last holidays. Ah there she is.”
They had come out into the small station yard. On the other side of it stood the dog-cart and in it stood Moira Gage, one hand holding the reins, the other shading her eyes. She was tall, slim and pale, not really pretty but graceful and attractive; from a distance she looked like a Shepperson drawing but when you got nearer you saw depths in her grey, scrutable eyes, which his charming mannerisms could never convey; she was dressed in a tweed coat and a skirt with a grey silk scarf over her shoulders. Peter ran forward and greeted her.
“Peter,” she said, “before you do anything else, do make Ralf put his hat on. He looks simply dreadful and I’m sure he’d be court-martialled or something, if anyone saw.”
“Three years of military life shatter any illusions about military discipline,” Ralf replied, climbing up into the dog-cart, “the only hardened militarist nowadays is the newly conscripted civilian.”
“Now he’s being clever again,” Moira laughed, “I really thought you lost that when you came down from Oxford. Among other things, it’s very bad manners when you are in stupid company.”
“Thank you,” Peter expostulated, “I wish you’d speak for yourself. I’m in the sixth now and write essays on industrial history and all sorts of things.”
“You seem to regard your history with most unreasonable pride,” said Moira, “from all I hear it sounds only slack.”
“All pride is unreasonable” said Ralf. To Peter it seemed that he had paused a moment hesitating whether “no pride is unreasonable” was the more impressive; he had long gone beyond the stage when a sweeping generalization could pass as an epigram.
“The aphorisms of a disappointed man,” said Moira. “The next remark like that Ralf and I get out and walk.”
Bulfrey Combe was a mile and a half out from Bulfrey and still kept most of the appearance of a country village. Bulfrey was a small town with two or three streets of cheap shops, a bank, and a small glass factory which formed the nucleus of a large area of slums which was gradually spreading its grimy tentacles along the roads into the
ESSAY
“Oh, yes,” said Lurnstein, “I had ideals at one time all right—we all do, you know.”
He was leaning back from the small table, on which the tea was set, eyeing my half finished portrait. I had had a long sitting and his beautiful china tea in his thin blue and white china came as a great relief.
He looked extremely handsome, I thought, in the golden afternoon light, in his picturesque studio overall; Jewish, of course, but with a distinguished air that made one overlook his stumpy hands and other signs of ill-breeding.
“Perhaps you’d like to hear something of my life,” he said, “it has not been without interest.”
He lit another cigarette, pushed the box, a beautiful piece of Moorish inlaid work, to within my easy reach, and then drawing a deep breath of smoke, began:
“I started life about as low as any new peer. My father was a Jew and we lived in the Jewish quarter off the Commercial Road. When he was sober he was very kind to me and my brothers. My mother never had any great significance for me, but I realize now that she must have been a very hard worked and hard treated woman as upon her fell the sole burden of supporting her husband and large family.
“From the time when my first memories start I have always been interested in drawing, and I used to use every scrap of paper and every stump of pencil I could find, but lines never satisfied me—I wanted colours and tones. And these I could not afford. Coloured chalks used to be my chief delight and I used to take them from the desk of the Rabbi who managed the local synagogue and to whom I used to go once a week for religious instruction. For my father, though quite indifferent himself, was always most particular that I should attend. The Rabbi used the chalks, I remember, to draw maps of the divisions of the tribes with.
“Well one day he caught me taking his chalks, but instead of beating me, as the red-haired master at the board school would have done, he asked me all about my drawing and finally persuaded me to let him take some of my work away to show to his rich friends. For he was the son of a very rich man himself and had been to the ’Varsity but had sacrificed it all to help his fellow countrymen in the slums. I tell you that there are just as fine acts of self-sacrifice done by the rabbis in the Yiddish quarter as by any of your parsons at Kennington, only they don’t brag about it.
“Well, he showed my work to his friends in the West, with the result that a few days later a man with a top hat and spats came to the door and asked to see me and my work. He gave half-crowns to all my brothers but he didn’t give me half a crown, and I remember, I was very offended until I heard that I was to be taken away and taught painting.
“That was the beginning of my ‘career.’ Those Jews ran me for the next five years, and I painted just as I was told to at the Academy school, to which I was sent. And everyone was very kind to me and I was introduced to lots of rich men, not only the moneyed Jews but men of your class who spend lots of money on being bored and are called ‘in society’ by lower middle class novelists. I began to acquire social polish and was being shaped into a pretty little gentleman; but all the time particularly when I could feel the grain of the canvas under my brush, I was dissatisfied.
“When I was nineteen they gave me a studio, nothing like this, of course, but a decent enough shed with a good north light—and set me up as a Society portrait painter. Well I painted and flattered the ugly old women, that came to me, for a time; but after a little I found I could stand it no longer. I was painting badly, insipidly, insincerely, and I knew I could do better. I saw that the whole Academic conception was false—yes, that sounds funny from me nowadays, doesn’t it? But we all see things more clearly when we’re young.
“That autumn the Italian futurists came to London and Marinetti delivered his epoch making series of broken-English lectures at the Dorée galleries. It was there, and particularly in Severini’s ball-room scenes, that I found what I and half Chelsea had been looking for.
“I always acted on impulses then, and when I came back and found in my room the luggage I had been packing for a tour through Italy with the Jews—they still ran me, though by that time I was making a fairly decent living—I was filled with revulsion. I wrote a brief, I am afraid rude, note to them, and slamming the door of my studio rushed out into the night.
“I have no clear idea of what happened that night. I went to the Café Royal and drank absinthe. And soon I joined a group at the next table and together, as the sham English Bohemians do, we drank a lot, & laughed a lot, and finally all reeled out into the cool air of Regent Street. There were girls with us too, who had their hair cut short though it was not fashionable then. The leader of the set was a beautiful youth with red-gold hair whom we all called Ronald. I never learned his sirname though I met him continually for the next year and shared his studio with him. He painted fierce warm-colored ‘abstractions’ in tremendous bouts of energy which left him lethargic and apathetic. He was a great friend of mine in the year I spent in our sham Quartier Latin. For after that night I left the Jews and spent my time with the young art students and futurists. We were a happy enough lot and I should always have looked back to that year as the best of my life if —
“Well, during that year I painted as I have never painted before or since. I painted as I knew I ought to without convention or restraint. I exhibited at the Mansard Gallery and in the Adelphi and reviews of my work appeared in ‘Blast’ and ‘The Gypsy.’ I was gloriously happy in my work & then it was all spoilt, and by a woman.
“I won’t say much about that, if you don’t mind. I was desperately in love and Ronald kept telling me not to be a fool. I wouldn’t listen to him and began to break with my friends. She was a model and her vision remains to me now as the most beautiful thing I need ever fear to see….. Well, the crash came, as Ronald said it would, and I tore up all my drawings and stuffed the stove in the studio full of them. And I scraped the paint off my canvases with my palette knife; and I had one tremendous night with the whole set ‘flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng, seeking to put thy pale lost lilies out of my mind.’ We were all very noisy and drunk and we told Rabellaisian jokes till far into the morning, and then in the grey of dawn I slunk back to the respectability and the Jews.”
He was speaking, up till now, very seriously and bitterly. Now he shook his great shoulders like a dog, tossed his head, & motioning me to resume my pose took up his palette.
“Oh yes, they received me with open arms. And Mayfair accepted me as its season’s attraction. The old life went on. They made me an R.A. and—Happy? why yes. Why not? I’ve made a good thing out of life. Ask any of your club friends, they’ll tell you so. But there are times when I see reviews of Ronald’s work and hear my academic colleagues’ sneers of him that I—Oh well; we must get on with the damned picture while the light lasts.”
THE HOUSE: AN ANTI–CLIMAX
Never, in its varied and not always unqualifiedly successful career, had the school been in a state of such utter disorganization and prostration, as in the Easter term, 1917. In France & Flanders, our thinly guarded, inadequately munitioned lines, were quite incapable of successfully resisting the menaced German “push,” every paper brought news of further mis-management and ill-success, every post news of some friend or relation who had been killed. At school, the houses had mostly been taken over, in the absence of their younger housemasters, by well meaning but incompetent elderly assistant masters; the prefects were young, and knowing that in a few weeks, at the most a few months, they would be “called up” to go to possible death, almost certain mutilation, cared little for school or house affairs. All over the country nerves were strained to the breaking point. This must be borne in mind when reading a story which at any other period would have been utterly impossible.
Every house, of course, claims to be the best, and in all probability has hypnotized itself into believing so, but there is one House that is more exclusive, more arrogantly self-confident, more self-contained, than any other. The House has many exclusive points of etiquette that the out-houses look on with contempt or resentment. They have largely their own slang, a great many of their own customs, and above all an unshakable contempt for the corps and all its machinations. Every flight of Inspection-day oratory leaves them the same, and even when all over the country militarism was all powerful, when soldiers drilled on the Christ Church quads at Oxford, they kept up their contempt with unmitigated bitterness. And then came Ross. A prefect, an excellent all round athlete, with a high place in the Classical sixth, he had remained quite a nonentity until he returned at the beginning of the Easter term to find himself head of the House, now demoralized and bereft of all its earlier dignity.
He had to take the entire management of the House into his own hands, and very soon he made himself felt. He stopped people getting “orders” for confectionery from their temporary housemaster, he stopped people getting leaves off Clubs & Parades without consulting the matron at all, he generally raised the house to something like its former standard and on the whole people liked it, for fundamentally men rather like being kept in order if it is done in the right way.
For the first three weeks all went well—too well really. Then came the Monday afternoon parade in which the corps started organizing for the House Platoons Shield. Ross delivered a violent little speech and, as in most of his speeches, he said rather more than he meant to. “Stand easy and pay attention. The display that you have given so far has been perfectly monstrous. I’ve never seen such marching in my life before—might be a whole lot of boy scouts. I can tell you, that if you think that because this House has been disgustingly slack in the past, you are going to be disgustingly slack now, you are quite wrong for once in your lives. You’re going to sweat for this—sweat your guts out—and I’m going to make you! Got that?” and he called the platoon up.
The House looked on him with undisguised amazement and disgust and slowly meandered through the platoon drill with their customary negligence.
Next Tuesday’s uniform parade saw the House with tarnished buttons, mud caked boots, and fouled rifles as usual. Next day saw the whole platoon doing “defaulters.”
And so it went on, and gradually the House began to give way to his personality and even attained a certain sullen efficiency when suddenly a few days after the House Trials, an occurrence happened which altered the whole complexion of affairs.
One afternoon Ross was sitting in the house captain’s room reading, when Stewart burst in, in running change, rather dirty, obviously just returned from a run.
Stewart was captain of Running and certain, people said, to be, at any rate, in the first three in the Five Mile—very possibly a winner.
He sat down on the window seat and began idly fingering the congealing mud on his knees. Then he looked up. “Ross,” he said in the drawl always affected by prefects & house captains in the House, “I suppose you know that you are playing hell with the House, with your corps-mania?” Ross said nothing but pushed his book onto the table after carefully marking the place. After a pause Stewart went on.
“The House hasn’t got either the time or inclination to do your beastly corps, and clubs properly. We’ve no chance for the Footer, I know, but we’ve got a damned good chance for the Five Mile Jerry; and we aren’t going to throw it away to play soldiers.”
Still Ross said nothing; only the corners of his mouth moved.
“Well to give you an example. I told young Merrivale that I wanted him for a training run today and he said that he had to clean his bayonet to show to you before hall, because it was rusty yesterday. I said I would make it all right with you, of course, but I can’t train a team decently if your beastly bayonets are going to get in the way every minute.”
Then Ross spoke. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Merrivale’s bayonet has got to be clean before he goes for any run.”
Stewart was genuinely astounded. “D’you mean to say you put your ruddy platoon shield before the Five Mile Jerry?” he demanded.
“You put it rather crudely” drawled Ross, “but that is what, I suppose, it comes to eventually.”
Then Stewart lost his temper. “There’s one thing you’re forgetting” he said, “and that’s that I’m not going to try and train a team with you getting in my light all the time. I’m a house-captain and needn’t run if I don’t want to. If you don’t chuck your corps-mania I shan’t run in the five-mile.”
Stewart of course meant this as a threat that could not be argued against, the idea that he would be taken at his word was unthinkable, as indeed in a cooler moment it would have been to Ross. But now he was out to score. “Then I suppose Caven will have to run after all—he’s first spare man isn’t he?”
They had both made a decision which they knew quite well would be disastrous but now neither could withdraw. Stewart, who had a great sense for the dramatic, went straight to the house board and crossed himself off the head of the list in a breathless silence.
The news spread round the House and then round the school with Oriental speed. The out-houses were openly exultant, the House sullen. Why, they asked, should they lose a cup, just because the bloods quarrelled. They split up into factions and argued incessantly. Ross had missed the House trials in the last two years & no one knew his capabilities as a runner, but he immediately began to train rigorously, and people soon saw that he meant to win the house the cup without Stewart, who watching with the appreciation of the connoisseur, saw that he was a very fine runner. The house settled down to watch the five mile as the settling of the feud.
Stewart, very repentant, came down in a great coat to watch the finish. The House did not win.
Personality and will can do as much as the Pelmen advertisements say, but they cannot force the pace up the Cow-Top and then lead a quarter mile sprint to Combs. A huddled heap after the Valley dyke was all that was left of Ross’s training.
A week later came the house Platoons competition and muffled up and very white Ross came down from the San to watch. He was bitterly conscious of his failure and wondering how he would be able to endure another term of the cold superiority of Stewart and the glowering animosity of the whole House.
But suddenly he saw that the House Platoon were drilling as they had never drilled before or—thank God! — have since. Public opinion is the most unaccountable thing in the world and with his failure had suddenly come a popularity that he would never have enjoyed before had he been triumphant. The House, in their own great way were showing him their change of opinion. Their equipment was clean, and under Stewart as platoon commander they were drilling with an enthusiasm which went far to counteract the effect of the lethargy of their previous efforts.
It would make a splendid ending if the House could be allowed to win the Shield, but this is a story of school life and anyone who knows the House will know that that is out of the question. Suffice it to say, however, that they were third, and that as Ross went down the grass slope to Chapel that evening, arm in arm with Stewart it seemed almost as if he had forgiven the House rather than that they had forgiven him. And after all that is greatness.
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