“I wish you would take me, Henry,” I managed to utter at last in a thin constrained tone.
“I can’t take you to-night, Christopher,” replied Henry gravely.
He rode off.
Choking with disappointment, I felt I could not bear to meet my parents just yet—Netta was in bed. Accordingly I went into the drawing-room, opened the piano and began to play a little piece by Grieg in which Henry was instructing me. The strong vibrant chords of this Väterlandisches Lied, with their emotional appeal, expanded my bruised heart—perhaps one day I should be a great musician and everyone, even Graham, would admire me! I was playing the piece for the third time with immense “expression” when my father put his head round the door.
“Do stop that awful row, Christopher,” he said irritably. “Your mother has a headache.”
Evidently I was not to become a great musician. ... If ever a child felt despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, I felt so then.
4
Looking back on these wretched schooldays—they did not last very long; Graham was sent away to boarding-school after the summer holidays that year, and I myself left the school shortly afterwards—but looking back on them now, I perceive of course, that, again, their troubles were not peculiar to Christopher Jarmayne; they were common to all boys (and girls too, I shouldn’t wonder) of my type. The weakling is a continual temptation to the streak of cruelty which lies in all of us, and the artist is always disliked, for he is not committed to the battle as are his fellows; he stands aside and watches. (Nobody likes to be watched by a critical intelligence, for nobody likes to be judged.) But it was certainly a great relief and stimulus when in my later teens I discovered from my reading that sufferings of this kind occur frequently in the biographies of men who have later made their mark. Indeed a very macabre story which I read quite recently—The Playground by Ray Bradbury—seems to postulate these youthful agonies for ail children. (One wonders about animals in the same stage. I have sometimes believed I could discern a wounding ostracism of one lamb by its fellows in their evening gambols, but perhaps I am mistaken here.)
There is something—not much, but something—to be said on the side of the tormentors. The weak are always by their weakness demanding response and protection, a response which the strong feel a moral compulsion to offer. Now nothing is more maddening than a moral compulsion to give an emotional response; at once one wishes to withhold it. Weakness in a way is—I will not say a form of moral blackmail (like a woman’s carefully timed tears) but—a continual presentation of a bill for pity. Small boys, whose moral sense is undeveloped and fund of pity small, are not prepared to pay this bill. Indeed cordial and generous payment is a lesson hard enough to learn in later life.
I perceive now, of course, that the yellow dandelions were shudderingly odious to me because the cut of their fiery golden petals reminded me of my father’s rippling hair and beard. I perceive too that there was some truth in my classmates’ assertions that they were playing a game with me in the grove.
They genuinely disliked me less there than anywhere, because they had a feeling of daring in venturing into that forbidden territory, and respected me for my defiance of authority, of the Trespassers board, in entering it.
Was there a certain masochism, a desire for punishment, in my seeking-out of Graham? When I read to-day of victims of the vile interrogations in dictator countries becoming attached to their cruel interrogators, I sometimes wonder whether something of this feeling did not colour my preference for my tormentor. Or was I simply going through the normal phases of social development—the human being needing, I am told, first his mother, then a group of friends, then a single friend of the same sex, then a beloved of the opposite sex—and reaching the third stage earlier than my contemporaries? Perhaps both; but this wretched experience of rejection made me ever afterwards intensely chary of offering my friendship; I could not believe that anybody could want it—or me.
It was years, however—I was in my thirties—before I fathomed the motive which lay behind Graham’s hatred of me. The enlightenment came eventually from Atkinson, upon whom I had to pay a business call. We met anonymously at first—he was the works manager of a Kirkroyd Bridge dyeing plant—but as soon as I saw his round face, his round-arched eyebrows, his round eyes and short stubby body, I exclaimed his name.
“Aye! And you’re Jarmayne tertius. You’ve grown pretty well, considering the wreckling you were then,” said Atkinson cheerfully.
“I was always grateful to you for rescuing my spectacles,” said I.
“Little devils we were then,” said Atkinson, shaking his head. We laughed together—on my part, rather falsely. “It was that Graham, you know,” continued Atkinson. “He had his knife into you, as they say.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you see, you knocked him out proper.”
“What do you mean?” I exclaimed angrily; for my unheroic failure on that fisticuff occasion particularly vexed me. “I hit him once, but it was the merest glancing blow. The knocking out was, I assure you, all on his side.”
“Nay,” said Atkinson, shaking his head again. “He was jealous of you.”
“Jealous! Impossible! What had I that he could envy?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Graham’s good looks, his power of leadership, his prowess in games.
“Brains. Graham were always top of the form before you came. Then you always beat him. Then he got tired of trying, and behaved stupid-like on purpose. That’s why he left—you remember? His father wasn’t satisfied with his progress. A very ambitious chap always, my father used to say, was parson Graham.”
I was dumbfounded. Such an idea had, I can truly say, never entered my head. But now I remembered the significant word rivals which Graham had used to me. My sympathy rushed out to Graham. He was dead by that time, too, which made it worse.
“I wish he would have been friends with me,” I said uneasily.
“Aye. You might have been as thick as thieves together,” agreed Atkinson. “I told him so. But you never seemed to notice what you were doing to him, you see. He was vexed to be outdone by a little squit like you. Now about this piece,” said Atkinson in a more serious tone, turning to the cloth in question, which lay on the long table beside us: “Your people say the dye’s uneven. But we say the fault’s in the weave. . . .”
So I too was to blame for the wretchedness of our schooltime together, and perhaps the results were worse for Graham than for me. My troubles then started in me, or confirmed in me perhaps, a hatred of persecution which has never left me all my life. Even to-day, forty years after Graham first snatched my cap, I cannot endure to see a child surrounded by a jeering circle of its contemporaries. A sharp pain twangs through my whole body at the sight; I have stopped the car, rushed across the road, interrogated children hotly, in a word made a public ass of myself, to effect a rescue. Political persecutions affect me in the same way; I cannot easily sit quiet while a concerted attack is made on any person, in the press, at a meeting or even in committee.
On the other hand, this experience at school turned me for ever away from pacifism. I discovered then, though of course without formulating it to myself, that peaceful intentions are no protection, no barrier against evil. Nobody in the world was more peaceful than I at school, more full of goodwill and eager friendliness. But it was not enough; it did not save me from suffering harm, or the others from the harm of inflicting harm on me. The law of life is self-defence; to abrogate that right leads logically to self-destruction. I love peace with all my heart, and seek to ensue it, but never since my schooldays with Graham have I believed that pacifism was the road to peace.
I see now too how, in relating everything that happens to one’s own feelings, one falsifies and loses one’s way. I have never forgotten the pain of rejection which I felt that night when John and Henry went out on their bicycles and left me. Yet in reality their actions had nothing whatever to do with me. They were related to a dee
p experience which my brothers were then beginning to share: namely a jealous rivalry over Beatrice Darrell. Henry already loved Beatrice— he had always loved her—with all the force of his strong, narrow, fastidious, upright nature; he gave her an adoring and utterly faithful homage and treated her, I am sure, with every possible delicacy and respect. John, a despiser of girls in his rough early teens, had just reached the stage when they suddenly blossomed into his chief preoccupation. A healthy, lusty, aggressive male, as soon as he became aware of Beatrice’s charms he set out to enjoy them. The tedium of Beatrice’s aimless life, and the natural daring of her disposition, no doubt assisted his advances; at any rate John and Beatrice met in the grove for kisses, as the events of that and the previous day sufficiently indicated if I had had eyes to see it. Both my brothers hoped to meet Beatrice that night; neither wished to be hampered in their courtship by a naïve and observant small brother.
5
My third and last school provided me, oddly enough, with what in spite of the modern dread of cliché and the recent amusing guying of this cliché in play and film, I can only call the happiest days of my life.
A short time after Graham’s departure I won a partial scholarship to a famous northern grammar school. As always when confronted with some ordeal—then as now—I kept my hopes in firm check before the test, reminding myself continually of the possibility of failure, in order to keep my nerves taut and my mind concentrated, while in my heart of hearts I believed I should succeed. My outward modesty of demeanour, however, deceived my family, so that they were astonished when I triumphed—and I, of course, was offended by their astonishment.
I went to this Northchester school, new to me but of ancient foundation, determined not to repeat my failure in Hudley. At all costs, I said to myself as, pale and excited, I boarded the train the first morning of that autumn term, at all costs I will be like other people this time. But immediately I withdrew this unqualified adherence to the normal. No, I said stubbornly if confusedly to myself, not at all costs. Even to be normal, even to escape persecution, even—absurd hope—to be liked, I would not sacrifice my love of literature. That came first. But almost everything else could be cast before the Moloch of conformity.
In the event, no such sacrifice was demanded of me. I found myself in a class of lads, mostly older than myself, who took schoolwork seriously because examinations loomed ahead on which the whole course of their lives depended. Accordingly every weekday was a joy to me. The solitary early rising in the dark; the tea drunk at ease alone; the rush down the long hill, where on all sides the mill chimneys were pouring out the black smoke of the first firing of the day; the swift powerful train, to catch which gave me a daily sensation of heroic achievement; the adventurous journey along the winding Pennine valleys between stern hills which gradually closed upon us until at last they barred our way and we plunged into the romantically named Summit Tunnel; the excellent teaching, the ever-widening horizon of one’s knowledge, the exultant expansion of one’s faculties; the justice and decency and reasonableness of school procedure; above all, the sense of separation from my family, all of whom were quite unknown to my schoolfellows—all this was bliss to me. I believed myself to be weighed down with work and took a very serious view of my responsibilities to my time-table, but even then I knew that I had found an environment exactly suited to the Chris Jarmayne organism and was enjoying happiness.
Unfortunately I did not enjoy this fruitful milieu long; I was torn away from it at the end of my first term.
6
Looking back at this brief experience, I have nothing to add or alter to my feelings then: only to confirm them by what may be regarded as a somewhat sinister fact. The buildings of the Northchester Grammar School, combined with the courtyard of an old Norman castle I had visited with Henry when his old bicycle descended to me, became, when I had left them for ever, the scene of my most vivid and permanent daydream. Even to-day, in moments of distress, anxiety, fatigue or sleeplessness, I visit them from time to time. School, then, was for twenty, thirty years the beloved “other place”, the “private garden”, the abode desired above all others by my heart. In its early form homosexual, this dream soon took on the heterosexual character natural to my development; but the relations of the boys and girls in this co-educational establishment were governed by rules, preposterously distorted of course in order to allow certain (always incomplete) sexual satisfactions but yet modelled on the lines of a traditional public school—as a novelist may model the manners and customs of an imaginary or even fantastic country, Ruritania or Costaguana or Animal Farm, on those of a real nation.
I need not, perhaps, say how bitterly I regret this youthful fantasy which hardened into permanence. I understand now all its implications of infantilism, of flight from manhood, its shirking of adult behaviour and responsibilities, its inhibiting and sterilizing power. Perhaps if I had not been torn away so soon from Northchester its grip would have been less tenacious, its fangs would have lacked the magnetism provided by frustration.
But on the other hand, granted that some daydream, some sheltering fantasy, was necessary to Chris Jarmayne’s existence; granted that a weak creature like myself needed some private world into which to escape from over-harsh reality and gain courage to continue the daily struggle; then possibly this school fantasy was less harmful than some other types. At least it held no sadistic, no masochist enjoyments; its rules embodied a decent and kindly if juvenile code of ethics. But it was not adult. That for many men—and for women too perhaps, though I think more rarely—schooldays are often the happiest days of their lives, strikes me as a fact psychologically most deplorable and dangerous. This fixation is not the fault of the school, of course, but of the adult world for being so inferior in attraction. I often think now, when called upon to address Parent-Teacher or other such associations designed to bring the school world into touch with family life: first that if such organizations had existed in my youth they would have been the end of Chris Jarmayne, for I could not have endured the invasion of my happy world of learning by my family; next that the ability to compose the different spheres of one’s life into a unity, a harmonious relation, is perhaps the prime mark of a courageous and well-integrated mind. (“Connect, connect!” as E. M. Forster urges.) Any part of one’s life which, so to say, slips away from the rest, is apt to turn into a fantasy—of fear or joy as the case may be.
The part played in my school fantasy by the wish-fulfilment Chris Jarmayne is highly significant. His name was never my own, but usually Etherington. My adoption of this variation of my father’s name shows at once my fixation on him and my efforts to conquer it by improving and refining on his personality. This Etherington, who as I have said before was never encumbered by a family, had (of course) all my good qualities and none of my bad ones. He was brilliantly clever and wrote—not essays or fiction, because I did that, myself in real life—but wonderful poems. He was strong for justice; he defended the weak, he resisted evil and routed the powerful— these villainous opponents were always rich, elegant and sophisticated, like Graham. After a period of storm and stress, during which he suffered much from the machinations of these wicked ones, Etherington triumphed and was acclaimed as a leader (or dux or captain or what-have-you) by an overpowering majority of the popular vote. In appearance chétif at a casual glance, Etherington was presently discovered by those who loved him to have finely cut and spirituel features, somewhat like those of Shelley, and though he laid no claim to permanent ability in games, he often, by tenacity and the application of intelligence, saved the day for the school on the playing-field when all seemed lost.
In later life, I have made quite a study of daydream fantasies as they have been recorded in literature—those of the Brontës, for example, and of Hartley Coleridge; also of fictitious characters such as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Du Maurier’s ill-fated pair in Peter Ibbetson, Kipling’s hero in The Brushwood Boy, Barrie’s Sentimental Tommy and Mary Rose, J. D. Ber
esford’s Jacob Stahl, Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine at the court of Louis XIV, and so on. It is difficult to discern in these cases the exact degree to which the day-dreamer becomes his wish-fulfilment hero or heroine. For my part, I never actually lived inside Etherington’s skin; I only watched him, though I felt keenly all the sensations I caused him to undergo. I sometimes wonder whether this detachment, this status of onlooker, was indicative and prophetic of my later rôle of novelist.
My fantasies, as I say, were not the fulfilments of evil or markedly anti-social desires; but unfortunately they were usually accomplished by the aid of some older or in some way superior inhabitant of the fantasy—at first male, presently female—who came to Etherington’s rescue and support. Rescue: it is unfortunately a key word as long as one turns back to the scenes of one’s immaturity for daydreams. Still, I am grateful as I say to Northchester for providing me with such a comparatively noble private world, though I deplore the resultant atrophy of adult impulse.
3
World
1
On the first morning of the holidays after my first term at Northchester I came down early, full of joyous anticipation. The morning delivery of letters tumbled through the letterbox as I entered the hall. I bent over them with my hands clasped scrupulously behind my back so as not to touch, and fortune favoured me: the long envelope with the Northchester postmark was clearly visible. So my school report had arrived; a report which I had every reason to believe was outstandingly good. Smirking happily, I entered the dining-room and waited impatiently for events to take their customary course.
Netta came in, beaming as usual, and we indulged in the childish catchwords and games which we enjoyed. Netta by this time was nine years old; a mane of silky flaxen hair rolled down her shoulders and her complexion was dazzlingly fair, yet she had no pretensions to beauty; a simple little face with upturned nose and mild surprised grey eyes endeared her to her family but made little impact on the outer world. My mother took the pains over Netta’s appearance which she too often neglected about her own, and the child always had a very fresh clean white blouse of some material or other, for blouses then were just emerging into ordinary wear. We giggled together, chased each other round the table, and incurred (as usual) the rebuke of Henry, who stalked in bearing the letters and my father’s newspaper, which he began to read as far as he could do so without unfolding it. Henry and John took it in turns at that time to go to the mill before breakfast, and it was evidently John’s turn that morning.
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