Noble in Reason

by Phyllis Bentley

  “It’s sweet of you, Chris dear,” said Beatrice, smiling again. “But I can’t, you see; I’m in alone with mother and she might need me.”

  I went off and played racquets by myself, indulging the while in the most lurid of my fantasies, for I had given God up from that moment. There was neither truth nor help in Him.

  Strangely enough, as it seemed to me then, the moment I abandoned God my problem became easier. I had now so much to think about that my fantasies, though they persisted and were always indulged in when I was feeling particularly wretched or particularly excited, lost their overpowering necessity. As soon as the element of divine revelation was removed, all the old Hebrew stories struck me as superb human revelations of insight and poetry; I re-read the Bible as a collection of human works of art and marvelled at its beauty and truth. The stories of Cain and Abel, of Jacob and Esau, struck me particularly; the antagonism between blood-brothers was evidently very ancient, I reflected. I went on naturally enough to extend the idea of “brothers” to all the members of the human race, and to wonder why human beings alone in creation fought wars with their own kin. Animals and birds of the same species did not fight each other except when mating, I recalled. These musings were particularly relevant to, perhaps even they were partly caused by, the prevailing atmosphere of unease and unrest about the aims of Germany, from whom an aggressive war was then freely prognosticated.

  This idea of human brotherhood, and my own sense of being despised, rejected, tyrannized over, suddenly sprang together and exploded into a burning political conviction, one Sunday afternoon when I was reading Hardy’s Dynasts, then recently published. I read that wonderful Chorus of the Pities:

  We would establish those of kindlier build,

  In fair Compassions skilled,

  Men of deep art in life-development;

  Watchers and warders of thy varied lands.

  Men surfeited of laying heavy hands

  Upon the innocent,

  The mild, the fragile, the obscure content

  Among the myriads of thy family.

  Those, too, who love the true, the excellent,

  And make their daily moves a melody.

  And immediately I took the mild, the fragile, the obscure content, everyone who was exploited, everyone who was dominated, everyone who was constrained by heavy hands and afraid, to my heart; I stood beside them, I was one of them. That is to say, all my political sympathies rushed towards the Labour party. My father and John were strongly Conservative, my uncle Alfred was a Liberal of the old-fashioned kind. From that day onwards it gave me a fierce pleasure to read in the papers about every political and economic phenomenon of which they strongly disapproved; a strike, a fiery speech, a Labour gain in municipal or by-election, made me happy for the day. When my relations discussed these matters, since I never expressed my opinions or put them into action, they took my agreement for granted—though John would occasionally give me an uneasy glance, as if he sensed that the ground felt warm beneath his feet, there was fire down below. For example: in company with John and Edie I remember seeing a film of A Tale of Two Cities. When the Bastille fell my emotion was so strong at this blow to all tyranny that my body trembled and my teeth chattered. John, sitting beside me, when the lights went up gave me a curious look; I dissembled as usual and forced a ghastly smile.

  It was part of this political feeling that I chose to be slovenly in my dress. My father was a natty dresser; John, for business reasons if no other, was always admirably clad in dark well-tailored suits of our own good worsted cloth. I took a pleasure in being unbrushed and down-at-heel; I thought this showed my revolt against bourgeois convention, my sympathy with the downtrodden poor.

  In a word, I spent these years in a deep and passionate resentment against my family, who (as I thought) chained me to this dreary West Riding life in which I could not hope to succeed.

  One other matter added to my unhappiness at this time. My diary confirms what I remember only too well, that during these years I caught severe head-colds every few weeks. Sniffling and snuffling about the house with raw nose and watery eyes and congested throat, shrinking from the harsh West Riding winds, the dank fogs, the smoke-laden air so irritating to my sensitive mucous membrane, I suffered such misery that the approach of a fresh cold made me almost hysterical with despair. I knew the chronology of every symptom—the mental irritation, the roving headache, the sore throat, the spinal shivers, the rising temperature, the onset of sneezes—and watched their advance with the helpless frenzy of a shipwrecked seaman on a raft driven by a swift current towards a foaming reef. Remedies proved ineffective, precautions useless. For while if I omitted a precaution and braved the West Riding climate between October and March with bared head or unmuffled throat, I caught cold at once, the taking of precautions, the muffler, the cap, the ammoniated quinine, seemed powerless to withstand the omnipotent germ. Dr. Darrell could make nothing of me. The prescription I longed for him to give never seemed to enter his head, and of course I never mentioned it: namely that I ought to winter in the south. Not that I particularly wished to live in the south: to be away from my family was the bliss I desired.

  4

  As I look back at this young Chris Jarmayne just growing out of his teens into his twenties, I cannot forbear to smile. I smile at his intense seriousness about himself, his morbid youthful melancholy, his jejune ambitions. But it is rather a sad smile too, for I pity the lad (and all others like him) deeply. He has a generous loving heart, a not unintelligent mind, a yearning for the good, a real desire to serve his fellowmen. No wish for power, no cruelty of any kind, no cunning device, ever enters his simple young head. But how cowardly the lad is in action! Why on earth doesn’t he speak out? How does he expect his family to guess his wishes? And how self-centred he is! Note how he waits and longs for someone to love and rescue him, instead of going out and loving and rescuing somebody himself! Of course the young Chris that was once me didn’t understand the first thing about himself, though during this period he made some tentative steps forward.

  Take the young Chris’s appearance, for example. In those days, how I admired my shabby clothes, my thin drooping shoulders, especially the lock of hair falling over my forehead. It seemed to express something about me, something about my view of life. And so it did, of course. But later this lock— often seen on young lads of this age—came to appear to me the hall-mark of the self-pitying, the unadjusted, the neurotic, and Hitler’s famous lock confirmed me in this view. Is it a concealment from the world, this drooping curl? A shrinking behind a curtain? At any rate, like other forms of exhibitionism such as zoot suits, “Teddy” suits, “Oxford bags” and so on, it usually indicates a certain self-consciousness, a certain pretence, even a certain mingled feeling of inferiority and conceit; its owner is to be pitied, encouraged, loved, but not quite trusted.

  Or take the colds which caused me such protracted wretchedness. Partly, no doubt, they were due to a physical cause, some slight malformation perhaps in my crooked nose, some weakness of the throat, for even to-day I am somewhat subject to them. But mainly, of course, their reason was psychological. They were retreats into which I retired when the world became really too intolerable. I am surprised that I did not realize this at the time, for I certainly often experienced a real joy as, released from my father’s presence on account of my sneezing and sniffing, I snuggled down into my warm bed, book in hand, with several long hours of easeful solitude before me.

  Loss of religious faith is a common phenomenon in adolescence, but I still find the young Chris’s arguments in this respect sound; after all I laid my finger then on the great difficulty of believing in a just, loving and omnipotent God: the existence of unhappiness and evil. Nor have I faltered from my young belief in the brotherhood of man, though I do not nowadays find its noble tenets, or rulers in fair compassions skilled, the exclusive property of any one political party. That my political convictions sprang partly from a desire to differ from my father and
elder brother, I am of course aware—at this stage I even hated certain patterns of fabric, for example the pine-cone, because my father liked them!—but to identify oneself with the cause of the injured and oppressed is never a mistake. As the Abbé Jeanne says in Romains’ Les Hommes de Bonne Volonté (I translate).

  On either side of a line uncertainly drawn . . . men and women tended to form into two flocks, into two species. On the one side were the Humble and Meek, on the other, those who were Proud in the imagination of their hearts.

  The division drawn by the Abbé does not of course, as he proceeds to explain, correspond to definite social classes or purely economic standards. It is a difference of spiritual attitude. The line is a vertical one drawn down through all classes, all sections, of society, between those who desire to share and love, and those who prefer to grab and hate. I perhaps aligned myself when young partly on account of unworthy and selfish motives, but at least I chose the right side. I must admit that I find it less easy now than I did then to remain meek—but at least I know it.

  The loneliness experienced by the adolescent is a matter of grave importance to the community, for it is at this point that the youth, boy or girl, breaks into anti-social activity or grows into a well-adjusted citizen. Is this loneliness greater nowadays than before? Some of our most trusted thinkers appear to believe that the Industrial Revolution created a society from which the artist must feel eternally alienated, and that the present adolescent unrest springs from the same source. This may be so, and yet I feel that Catiline’s conspiracy, for example, was run by a kind of cosh-gang of neurasthenic Old Etonians, and that the artist in any generation, unless he happens to be born into a family already devoted to that art, has a hard row to hoe. Indeed it is only to be expected that the affectionate lay parents should feel dubious of the wisdom of his child’s attempting an art; the livelihood being so uncertain, the emotional ups-and-downs so distressing.

  To return, however, to my own case. I have recently read an interesting study of some modern writers, entitled Rehearsals of Discomposure, by Nathan A. Scott, in which three different types of loneliness are defined. A human being may feel, says Dr. Scott, isolated because alienated from the contemporary community, or isolated because structurally discontinuous from all other human beings, or as it were cosmically isolated because the conditions of human life in the universe are intrinsically unfavourable to human happiness. He cites a formidable array of modern philosophers, poets and novelists who have felt this cosmic unease, caused by humanity being pulled in one direction by (to quote Kafka) his heavenly collar and in the other by his earthly collar, so that one or the other is always throttling him. Hardy of course has the same idea, which he expresses by blaming the Immanent Will for furnishing humanity with aspirations which directly contradict the Will’s mere life-production aim. But the young Chris Jarmayne did not feel this cosmic loneliness at this stage. Nor did he worry about structural discontinuity with other humans; he enjoyed being a separate individual entity. It was my alienation from the community around me which gave me so much pain.

  There were then in the provinces few or none of those agreeable societies, so mistakenly jeered at by the sophisticated, in which the lover of chess or chrysanthemums, pigeons or plays, can meet with like enthusiasts and find pleasure in their company. (Musical societies existed, for most West Riding people love, if on differing levels, most kinds of music; but I was not musical.) Accordingly I never met anyone who had the same interests as myself. It was as if a sentence of solitary confinement had been passed upon me. If I now spend much time on such societies, which now abound, it is from a very real sense of what they may mean to lonely youth. All the same, in my ingenuous youthful hopefulness I never questioned that there was a good life somewhere, if only I could reach it; somewhere, I felt sure, there were people who could talk really knowledgeably about Balzac or Dostoevsky, which had now become my rather more advanced criterion of culture. I looked about eagerly for such people, I scanned the horizon, at the first sign of literary interest in anyone I met I charged down on them with hordes of questions and frightened them away. But fellow-litterateurs remained obstinately beyond the purple rim as far as I was concerned, and I had neither the knowledge nor perhaps the courage to seek them over the hills.

  Still, I feel that, as I said, I made some progress during this period, in spite, or perhaps because, of my unhappiness. I missed a clue in connection with my textile failure. I might have said then: “That is how others feel when they cannot understand things that I easily understand.” But I could not see that yet. On the other hand, when I perceived that my poor mother’s temptation was in essence the same as mine, and when I aligned myself with the injured and oppressed, I had taken a definite step forward, for I had at least learned that there were others who suffered like myself. Also, though my agonized struggles to give up my daydreams altogether failed, I acquired a technique with which I could control them at will temporarily.

  But I would not go through this period again for anything that could be offered me—unless indeed I could buy at such a heavy price the power to create a masterpiece, which is unfortunately not very probable.

  5

  War

  1

  The great gong of greed and anger clanged, and Europe was at war.

  Patriotic enthusiasm is now so suspect that it is difficult to throw myself back into the warm, simple, straightforward feelings of 1914. But war had not then been recognized as a discredited instrument and universal curse; all history, much fiction and drama and even a good deal of poetry, was concerned with war, and phrases like with your shield or on it, gallant and glorious and dulce et decorum pro patria mori gave it a golden flourish of trumpets. We loved England with all our hearts; after a long series of provocations the abominable Germans had at length torn up their guarantee of Belgium’s neutrality, characterizing it as a mere “scrap of paper,” and invaded “gallant little Belgium” and France; England rushed to implement her promises and go to their support. In these clear and simple terms the youth of England saw the situation and hurried to the recruiting offices.

  I watched them go with a wistful, passionate yearning, a painful excitement; for I can truly say that it would be difficult for anyone’s love for England to exceed my own, and every instinct of my young manhood throbbed with desire to serve her in this dangerous, glorious, adventurous, soldiering way. But—this is scarcely credible but true—at first it never entered my head that I should be allowed to do so. Such exciting adventures were not for Chris Jarmayne, I thought; I could not imagine ever securing my father’s permission to go. Occasionally, in the first few weeks of the war, I tried to screw up my courage to mention the matter to him, but never got further than throwing out a few general remarks, such as that the age limits for recruits were 19 and 35, the minimum height 5 ft. 6, there was a recruiting office at the Hudley Drill Hall, and so on. To these feelers my father made no reply. As retreat and disaster increasingly overtook the British Expeditionary Force, my longing to be in France with them became increasingly anguished and my anger against the circumstances which (as I thought) thwarted this desire increased to match. The little street which contained the frontage of Hilbert Mills turned off Station Road, and accordingly the first considerable departure of the men from our local regiment was just visible from our office windows. There were flags, there were bands, there were cheers; the drumbeats stirred my blood; the lines of marching men in khaki called me irresistibly to their side. My nose pressed against the window-pane, I exclaimed in tones of heartfelt longing to John, who was standing at my side:

  “Oh, I do wish I could join the Army!”

  “Why don’t you then?” snapped John.

  I looked at him in amazement. He was not at his best that morning. Edie had been brought to bed with her fourth child the night before; something went wrong and the child, their first and as it proved last boy, seemed unlikely to survive. John had the harassed and ungroomed look of a man who has been u
p all night amid domestic troubles with which he is not qualified to cope. Remembering this, I made no reply to him except a doubtful and deprecating smile.

  “What’s stopping you?” said John as before.

  Did he mean, could he really mean, that he had been expecting me to enlist and was astonished and disappointed that I had not done so? I gaped at him; his look of irritated disgust certainly bore out this view. I turned to my father, who was sitting at his desk. He too had the air of one who has long wished to utter a disagreeable truth, and now hears it spoken with virtuous relief. A hot tide of colour flooded into my face and neck. I exclaimed: “Well!” in a tone of fury and snatching my cap from its peg rushed from the room.

  My thoughts as I hurried along the streets were turbulent and unpleasant. My behaviour had been fatuous. I had concealed and repressed my wishes, believing myself to be acting with noble self-sacrifice, while my father and John thought me a cowardly, cold-blooded, self-indulgent young ninny. Well! Let it be a lesson to me, I told myself, almost weeping with rage; in future I would assert myself, I would declare my wishes boldly. I reached the queue outside the Drill Hall—the march of the battalion had stirred the emotions of other young men besides myself—and joined it. Gradually, as my face cooled and my heart-beats slowed, I began to smile. After all, I was getting my wish. I should soon be in the Army, “in” the war. Rain fell as we waited; some of my companions turned up their coat-collars and crouched into such shelter as the buttresses of the building offered, but I stood erect and let the shower drench me; henceforward I was to be a hardy out-of-doors man, a soldier.

  When at last I had nearly reached the desk behind which an officer was sitting, a sergeant tapped me on the arm.

  “Fall out, my lad,” he said.

  Thrilled by this military term though a trifle uncertain of its meaning, I hesitantly stepped aside.