Hare Sitting Up

by Michael Innes

  It was Toby’s voice that brought him back to an awareness of the course of the argument. ‘So if people must be killed,’ Toby was saying, ‘there’s everything to be said for doing the job cheaply. It comes to that. Back to Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan.’

  ‘But there’s also much to be said for doing it with discrimination,’ Juniper said. ‘High explosive wasn’t too bad there. If you dropped it from Zeppelins’ – he paused for a moment, wondering if any of his hearers would be very clear about what a Zeppelin was – ‘or torpedoed it into a passenger liner, you were at least still more or less taking aim. And even if you blockaded a whole nation, you presumably knew what you were about – if that indeed can be called knowledge, which is, presumably, unaccompanied by imaginative realization.’ He paused again, aware that there was a real stillness in the railway compartment. ‘But the hydrogen bomb is, of course, quite simply madness. It’s spectacularly effective – just as would be some contrivance for ensuring that the earth should fall into the sun. It’s indiscriminate to that degree. We bankrupt ourselves, as one of you said, to manufacture something which must destroy us if put into use. So cheap ways of indiscriminate slaughter would be a little more rational. And cheap ways of very large-scale but yet controllable slaughter would be more rational still. A relative rationality, of course. Considering the whole thing entirely as an inside job.’

  There was silence. ‘An inside job?’ somebody asked.

  ‘Inside the madhouse. My generation are all inside. We’re trapped into making all our calculations as if an outside didn’t exist. Your generation has the job of breaking out, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Certainly we have.’ Toby stretched his long legs farther on each side of Juniper’s shoes. He had the appearance of being very relaxed. ‘But we need to get the know-how. A hint or two, say. And I take it you don’t mean, sir, that your own generation is entitled simply to abdicate responsibility?’

  ‘Certainly not. But I’m being a bore.’ Juniper suddenly felt so tired that he wanted to get out of the whole conversation. ‘It’s not really stuff for a schoolmaster to pontificate about.’

  ‘You seemed to have some specialized knowledge,’ the dark Gavin said abruptly. ‘Those £8,000 advertisements, for instance.’

  Juniper smiled. ‘It’s very indirect. A sort of family connexion.’

  ‘We may all have that, in a manner of speaking.’ Arthur Ferris spoke after having remained silent for some time. ‘I don’t know whether you heard us joking about job hunting. Well, we can’t tell where any job will land us. Whether we’ve read Arts or Science, some vast industrial concern is quite likely to suck us in. That’s true even of the women–’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alice interrupted with spirit. ‘Although the probability is that we shall become governesses, no doubt.’

  ‘Don’t trail feminist red herrings, Alice dear. I’m saying we’re all liable to be sucked into concerns which have what you may call close family relationships with slaughter. There’s no escaping it.’

  ‘You can teach,’ Juniper said – and knew he said it a little stiffly. ‘Not much money. But you can teach in a decent school. I’ll get any of you a job tomorrow.’

  ‘But what if we taught sedition?’ Toby asked cheerfully. ‘Or, if not sedition, at least thoroughly subversive ideas? What if we marched the kids to one of those atom-busting places, and urged them to lie down and bite the bobbies in the calves? It might be keeping schoolmastering going as an honourable profession, if you ask me. But what would the parents say? And what would happen to the fees?’

  ‘What indeed,’ Juniper said, and let his tone indicate his disinclination to pursue this line.

  ‘I’m much more interested,’ Gavin said at once, ‘in something else. It’s the twilight of the gods idea – the fascination of bringing everything else down with you as you fall. Hitler was gripped by that, I imagine. But you needn’t necessarily be a Wagnerite to feel the tug of it.’

  Alice crossed a green leg over a yellow one. ‘Death-wish stuff,’ she said. ‘How does it correlate with actually dying? Does anybody know? You see, we’ve been talking about the dangers of concentrating power – and far more potential destructive power than has ever existed before – in the hands of old, sick men. Suppose they’re dying because they want to die–’

  ‘Which is very great rot to begin with,’ Toby interrupted cheerfully.

  ‘But I’m just trying to keep an open mind. Would there really be any tendency in an old, sick man – an unconscious tendency, I mean – to take the whole outfit with him?’

  For a moment everybody considered this problem soberly. And again Juniper found himself strangely moved – this time, just by the silence. The thought of these young people didn’t perhaps go very deep. But they were applying what information they had – including some surprisingly old-fashioned psychological conceptions – to problems that were very real to them. And to him.

  ‘I don’t believe in your fatal old men,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m more ready to be scared of fatal young ones. Chaps just like you and me. The chaps who cruise round with these things in the sky. What about one of them going off his head?’

  ‘But they’re not quite like you and me.’ Toby said this with ironical conviction. ‘They’re not highly educatable types like us – and therefore, of course, they’re far less neurotic and unstable. Which is fortunate, is it not?’

  Once more Jean sat up straight. ‘What awful rot! It’s been proved again and again that the most surprising people will pack up under strain. And I think Gavin is right with his twilight of the gods stuff. And then, you know – I’m not sure if it’s the same thing – there are people obsessed with a violent pathological loathing of the whole human species. I have one in my own family, as a matter of fact. Imagine giving Jonathan Swift a hydrogen bomb.’

  ‘Jonathan Swift?’ Arthur asked. ‘Is that a chap at Balliol?’

  ‘He wrote a book called Gulliver’s Travels,’ Jean said crushingly. ‘As it’s a nursery book when the awkward bits have been expurgated, even you might be supposed to have heard of it.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Arthur said, slightly abashed. ‘But there is a Jonathan Swift at Balliol. I’ve played squash with him.’

  ‘And have you ever,’ Gavin asked, ‘played squash with D H Lawrence?’

  ‘A bearded chap at Trinity,’ Toby added gravely.

  ‘Of course if you have to talk like idiots–’ Arthur said, gravely offended, and reached for a newspaper.

  ‘Perhaps you’d prefer a book?’ Gavin asked, and held out the volume he had opened at the beginning of the journey. ‘I’ll show you at which end to begin.’

  Without rising to this childish insult, Arthur took the book and glanced at the title. ‘Women in Love? I’ve read that one.’

  They had all, it seemed, read Women in Love – a fact that surprised Juniper a good deal. But he remembered having been told that, for this generation, Lawrence was the sole novelist to have survived from the beginning of the century.

  ‘Is there something relevant,’ he asked Gavin, ‘in Women in Love?’

  ‘Something frightfully relevant, if you ask me. Do you remember a character called Rupert Birkin? He ends up all cosy and smug with something he calls an ultimate marriage, while his unenlightened friend Gerald Critch walks out into the snow and gets frozen dead like a rabbit. That’s the story. But, earlier on, Birkin has this hating mankind in the guts neurosis pretty badly.’

  ‘Lawrence had it himself,’ Alice interrupted. And added conscientiously: ‘On one side of his complex nature, that is.’

  ‘Birkin,’ Gavin continued, ‘invites this girl he’s going to have his ultimate marriage with to agree that humanity is dry-rotten, and that healthy young men and women are in fact apples of Sodom with insides full of bitter, corrupt ash. Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and things would be better if every human being perished tomorrow. He asks her – this girl he’s going to sleep with, mind you – whether she doesn’t fi
nd this a beautiful clean thought. No more people. Just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up.’

  ‘A hare sitting up?’ Toby asked. ‘And nobody with a gun?’

  ‘The beast will degenerate,’ Arthur said. ‘Nothing to bolt from.’

  ‘And there’s a good deal more of it,’ Gavin went on. ‘Birkin is fanatical. He says he would be ready to die like a shot, to know that the earth would really be swept clean of people. The question is: is there a real mentality like that, or is Lawrence just making it up?’ He turned to Juniper, as if in direct challenge. ‘What do you think, sir?’

  ‘I think that Birkin is putting in rather a tall order. In point of discrimination, I mean. You remember that we were talking about that? Well, it seems that nowadays getting rid of the human beings wouldn’t be too difficult. But I’m not so sure about sparing the hare, or even the grass.’

  ‘Who cares?’ Jean asked. ‘A lot of Women in Love is quite terrific. But Birkin on the hares and the grass is sentimental tosh. I remember Bertrand Russell doing a radio talk about the bomb, and saying something about the innocent birds and trees. Perhaps there are people with whom that sort of thing goes home. But – although, as it happens, I’m rather keen on birds – I’m not one of them. This strikes me as a human world, or nothing.’ Jean paused, as if uncertain about her own logic. ‘Alice, what do you think?’

  ‘About Birkin in the novel? I remember him as quite harmless. A harmless bore. Nobody who poured out that sort of talk would ever be a danger to anybody. There’s a place in the book where some irritated female hits him over the head with a paperweight or something. But all he does in reply is to go out and climb a hill and take his clothes off and roll in the flowers. Ferdinand the Bull couldn’t be more innocuous.’

  ‘But if this Birkin,’ Toby said, ‘believed himself to be an out-and-out do-gooder, full of an exalted love of, and belief in, humanity? If he was a type who is quite noisy in that way – but really because he is smothering a still small voice inside himself that is taking the corrupt ash and apples of Sodom line–’

  ‘Over-compensating,’ Alice interrupted happily. ‘Then, of course, he’d be a frightful danger. Birkin mustn’t have the bomb.’

  ‘Birkin didn’t know about the bomb,’ Toby said. ‘The interesting – and perhaps daunting – fact is precisely that.’

  Juniper looked at Toby curiously. He still felt that this long-limbed lounger was, intellectually, the pick of the bunch. ‘How do you make that out?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s something that all the little books, and all the little lectures, tell you about Lawrence. He was a prophet. Wasn’t somebody talking about Bertrand Russell? Well, he says that Lawrence had developed the whole philosophy of Fascism before the politicians had thought of it. And with the bomb, you see, it’s rather the same. Nobody had dreamed of anything that could wipe out the human race–’

  ‘Martians,’ Arthur interrupted. ‘There was already lots of science fiction of that sort.’

  ‘Well, yes – but that’s a special case, and merely fantastic. My point is that here is Lawrence’s Birkin brooding over the image of something which comes within the bounds of sober possibility thirty years later. I don’t like it. I’m not sure it doesn’t frighten me.’

  ‘Of course,’ Alice said, ‘it might be a sort of dream-prophecy, all disguised and inside out. It may really be the hares that are wiped out. There was that disease that nearly annihilated the rabbit.’

  ‘And that,’ Toby said robustly, ‘brings up another topic. Bacteriological warfare. Cheaper by a long way, I imagine. But whether it can be used so as not to bounce, I don’t know.’ He looked across the compartment at Juniper. ‘Have you any information on that, sir?’

  ‘None whatever.’

  For a moment there was the effect of a full stop. Juniper realized that he must have spoken abruptly.

  ‘I imagine,’ Alice said, ‘that it’s even more hush-hush than bombs. If it really exists.’

  ‘I think it exists,’ Juniper said, more mildly. ‘In fact, I have a brother who has some information about it. But he never makes it a subject of discussion. No doubt that’s because it’s as hush-hush as can be.’

  ‘And perhaps,’ Jean said, ‘because it’s about the very nastiest thing that can be thought of? Just as an idea, it seems even nastier than the bomb.’

  Juniper nodded. ‘I quite agree. At a first glance, the possibility of responsible scientists lending themselves to such investigations seems merely fantastic. And yet one can see how it is. The threat is judged to exist. Means of defence against it must be considered. And so the field, the area of study and experiment, is established.’

  ‘And something else is established too.’ Jean’s voice shook a little. ‘That we really are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.’

  Once more there was the slightly awkward pause that Jean was apt to induce. Alice turned quickly to Arthur. ‘Jonathan Swift again,’ she said kindly. ‘That Balliol man.’

  ‘God be with you, Balliol men,’ Gavin quoted solemnly.

  They all laughed quickly. Only Juniper – perhaps because he was not young and no longer much subject to the sudden touch of cold fear – alone remained grave.

  ‘Swift on the vermin is all right,’ he said. ‘But Shakespeare’s more succinct.’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ Arthur Ferris, as if suddenly reminded of old pupillary days at Splaine Croft, had turned to him expectantly.

  ‘It’s a simple statement about self-destruction and the evil in the heart of man:

  Our natures do pursue,

  Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,

  A thirsty evil; and when we drink we die.

  I can’t remember who is speaking – and it’s not important. What the lines carry does seem to me important, and I’ve often been haunted by them.’

  Everybody looked at Juniper curiously – as if after this he must have something more to say. But he remained silent. And presently, as the train ran into Paddington, he did no more than exchange a few words with Ferris as an old Splaine boy. He knew that the talk of these casual travelling companions, unlike the lines from Measure for Measure, would soon pass out of his head. He knew that he would probably never again set eyes on Toby, Arthur, and the rest of them. But for a little time, at least, the encounter had disturbed him.

  And he knew that it was because he had mentioned his brother – had fingered, in his own mind, an area where a great uneasiness lay.

  He took a taxi across to Waterloo – although the tube would have been quite as quick. The taxi provided the feeling, if not the reality, of haste. And he didn’t want to look at London, still less to run into any London acquaintance. He just wanted to get quickly to Splaine Croft. It was neurotic, he knew, his recurrent sense of the place as a refuge – precisely as neurotic as the disposition that worried him in his brother. If he really gave the impulse rein, he would be in as desperate a case as those obsessional scholars who scarcely dare venture out of the great womb-like museums and libraries. Whereas Splaine wasn’t really a bit like that. It was a place where quite an aggressively creative job was done – both on young bodies and young minds. Even now, in the middle of the holidays, there would be things to tackle as soon as he got back there. If it spelt anything, it spelt sanity. That, for him, was its governing idea – that, or it failed him utterly. So it would be a pity, after just these three days at Oxford, to make his return to that sanity by a route that took him, so to speak, right round the bend.

  The trouble, of course, was this family complex, as it must be called. Look how it had been touched off on the train. And needlessly, likely enough. As so often before.

  But although he had taken a taxi from Paddington to Waterloo, he walked – comfortably enough, with no more than his outsize briefcase – from Splaine Junction to the school. He liked particularly the short tramp through the village. Tiny though the place was, there might be half
a dozen people with whom to pass a confident time of day. He liked the smell of the smithy – a smell that still came straight out of childhood. He liked, in the window of the dairy, the enormous and highly polished milk can that never ceased to enchant the boys when they came down to spend their pocket money. It had an elaborately engraved inscription: Special Cows kept for Invalids and Infants. There was a tradition of daring new boys to go in and ask if they might see the special cows. Juniper supposed that once the special cows must really have existed – for commercial ballyhoo had been only in its infancy when that legend had been engraved on the shining metal. But what had been special about them? There was a real subject for research in that.

  Juniper turned through the lodge gates and gave a wave to Currill, the groundsman, who was putting in a little work in his own neat garden. The roof of the school – a pleasant tumble of quite spurious Tudor gables – appeared for a moment through a gap in the trees. Then it vanished until Juniper came round the last sweep of the drive. He heard boys’ voices from one of the broad tiled verandas. Yes, there they were, the little holiday crowd: three regulars whose parents were in Africa or the Far East – distinguishable by their regulation blue corduroy shorts and windcheaters – and along with them eight or nine holiday visitors, recruited to help with the overheads. But recruited, too, to keep the place alive other than at the purely economic level. Splaine Croft was a dismal place without boys: a slightly vulgar Edwardian country house degraded into a derelict barracks. But when the boys were there, you didn’t notice how the once handsome appointments had been kicked to bits – or you didn’t notice, provided you had a taste for boys mucking around. In term- time there were seventy-eight of them. And almost all the time, they seemed to be tumbling about in form-rooms or corridors or the stable-yard or the playing fields. There couldn’t be less regimentation anywhere in England. It was surprising that they did rather well.

  The boys playing on the veranda looked up only for a moment as Juniper climbed the steps to the front door. They knew that the headmaster, although a noticing sort of person, hadn’t much fancy for being noticed; he preserved with his pupils, precisely as he did with his staff, the sort of courteous aloofness into which some men grow with middle age. So, entirely unselfconsciously, the boys went on with their game. They were playing marbles.