THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

7

The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was

because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly

because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way

and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little

antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I

was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never

quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a

fight-in all my time there were only three fights-but I followed

my own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian and

politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in

modern warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room

during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and

often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way

home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent

boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested

in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a

magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was

indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books-which I

detested-and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science

and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps. School work

and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked

well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was

abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the

charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of

Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the

old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere,

with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a

continualpleasure to me. But these things were certainly not the

living and central interests of my life.

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent-from the

masters even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go

freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the

Agent-General for East Australia. We two discovered in a chance

conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of

us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca

pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.

Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the

school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as

water on the way to India. But Britten had come up through the Suez

Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave

him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we

got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a

sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions

concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.

We became congenial intimates from that hour.

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the

Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment

between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand

and human intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher

education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the

doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my

mind. As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our

time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of

solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite

joint enterprises. I went several times to his house, he was the

youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and

let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in

vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of

provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the

Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters. We

went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made

an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and

Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way

places together.

We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom

warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had

both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle

about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our

attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind

hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces,

fighting from house to house. The hillsides about Penge were

honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had

created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him

West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate

and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized

the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army-

reinforced by Germans-advancing for reasons best known to

themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary

game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a

success of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed

defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the

sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a

large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut

out of paper.

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by

Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's,

admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers

fighting the war game in Caxton Hall. We developed a war game of

our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead

soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at

six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.

For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.

Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a

profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have

understood.

And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to

write, for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had

discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies

as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full

of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of

expression. Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had

disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things

had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking. I was

somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked

along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another

that we had never read Lucretius. We thought every one who mattered

had read Lucretius.

When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and

died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem

examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days

been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change

in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my

Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms

with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a

mile and a half from the school. So it was I came right into

London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.

Tehose were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;

Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw

us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books,

pursued the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and

the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and

thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of

face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.

Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite

limitations. We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we

went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith

and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we

got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-

student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in

Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground floor

illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our

times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over

our Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did

exhaustively. But on the other hand I do not remember any

discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships. There, in

spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a

peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had occasion either

of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we were

instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed

of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We

evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.

We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the

emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had

oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We

had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of

theological caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family

by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS,

and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me. That and the BAB

BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.

For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a

tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very

directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been

comatose for some years. But there we came upon a disappointment.