‘The Watcher in Spanish’ was the latest of our conceits. The phrase came, I believe, from a line in a poem, about: ‘The Watcher in Spanish cape …’ We imagined him as a macabre but semi-comic figure, not unlike Guy Fawkes, or a human personification of Poe’s watching raven. He appeared to us, we said, at moments when our behaviour was particularly insincere; one might, for example, be telling a boastful story, or pretending an interest in heraldry, or flattering the wife of a don—and there, suddenly, he would be standing, visible only to ourselves. He made no gesture, never spoke. His mere presence was a sufficient reminder and warning. Mutely, he reminded us that the ‘two sides’ continued to exist, that our enemies remained implacable, beneath all their charming, expensive, scholarly disguises; he warned us never to betray ourselves by word or deed. He was our familiar, our imaginary mascot, our guardian spirit. We appealed to him, made fun of him, tried to deceive him. Often, when we were alone together, we spoke to him aloud. ‘Come out of that corner!’ Chalmers would shout. ‘You needn’t think we can’t see you! Now, leave us alone—do you hear? We’re busy.’
It was the Watcher, we said, who disapproved of my presence at Black’s poker parties and vetoed all Ashmeade’s invitations to bring Chalmers with me to coffee after Hall; in other words, we were jealous of each other’s friends. On the rare occasions when we attempted jointly to entertain, the Watcher immediately put in his appearance; our whole behaviour, when a third party was in the room, became so strained and falsified that we seemed to each other to be acting in a disgraceful kind of charade. Every word, every laugh rang sham as a bad penny, every smile or gesture was an act of treason to our dearest beliefs. As soon as the visitors had gone, our mutual accusations would begin, half in joke, half in earnest. Very soon, we both agreed to keep our respective acquaintances to ourselves.
Chalmers was particularly alarmed by what he regarded as my dangerous weakness for the society of the college ‘Poshocracy’—a word he had coined to designate the highest of our social circles. In our college, Chalmers pointed out, people were far too subtle to admit openly that they admired titles, Blues, money, good looks or academic successes; they preferred simply to say that a young man was ‘nice’ (or, as we put it, ‘posh’). A group was therefore formed of all the ‘nicest’ people—each of whom possessed one or more of the required characteristics. ‘Niceness’ was written all over every member of this favoured caste; you heard it in the tones of his voice, it shone from his clear kind eyes, it animated his negligent yet graceful movements, it was tactfully expressed in the colour-scheme of his tie, pullover and socks. We used to watch the Poshocracy from our window as they walked about the court, met, waved gaily, exchanged suitably jolly greetings. ‘Look, look!’ Chalmers would mutter, rubbing his hands together in gleeful ecstasies of hate: ‘Did you see that? Did you see the way he handed him that book? Look at the way he’s kicking that stone! Christ, how electrically vile!’
When Chalmers had first arrived at the college, the Poshocracy were prepared to welcome him into their midst. He was ‘nice’ on three counts—a scholar, a footballer and good-looking. Black was ‘nice,’ too; but not quite so ‘nice’—presumably because his public school was socially inferior to ours. Both of them, however, were invited to an inspection coffee party. Neither made a good impression. Black simply could not be bothered with his hosts, and showed it. Chalmers’ behaviour was more complicated. He was, he admitted, mildly flattered and even prepared to associate with these people—on his own terms. He advanced a couple of millimetres from his shell, sensed some faint suggestion of an insult (probably imaginary) and immediately withdrew. The Poshocracy, who were no fools, were rather intrigued; this was the first time they had had to deal with a man who actually did not want to get to know them, and was yet so clearly eligible for their favours. (Black, I suppose, they dismissed as a mere ill-bred boor; in any case, he was only a border-liner.) Good-natured, indolently curious, they pursued Chalmers for a little, teasing him with invitations, accepting his obviously insincere excuses with a knowing, forgiving smile. Then they left him to himself—a certified eccentric, not ostracized, perfectly understood. ‘Chalmers?’ they would have murmured, if asked: ‘Oh yes—the world’s nicest man … such a pity he’s so shy …’
And now, a year later, it was my turn to be dealt with. As senior scholar among the freshmen, I had, at any rate, the right to an inspection, and as it happened, I was quite presentable. I didn’t look like a midnight swotter, hadn’t pimples or a grammer-school accent, didn’t wear boots; further enquiries (exceedingly tactful) disclosed a minor ‘county’ family with the background of an Elizabethan ‘place.’ So I was all right—even, perhaps, an agreeable surprise. One invitation led to another.
And really, I secretly thought—whatever Chalmers might say—however disloyal it might be to admit it—the Poshocracy could be very nice indeed. Or so I felt while I was actually with them. Their civilized, flattering laughter went to my head. The truth was, in my heart, I really enjoyed society: I could talk their language, I could make jokes, I could strike the right note—and if the Watcher appeared, well, he was merely an addition to my audience. Later, of course, in the sobering atmosphere of Chalmers’ room, I mimicked and sneered, hypocritically describing my sayings and doings as a spy’s ruses in the midst of the enemy camp. I thus enjoyed a repetition of my social success; for Chalmers laughed too. He didn’t suspect me, at first, of the slightest breach of good faith.
But the Poshocracy knew that I was Chalmers’ friend, and it wasn’t very long before they began to suggest, in their kindly way, that I should help to bring him back to the fold. Couldn’t I use my influence? Wouldn’t he, perhaps, come along with me on Thursday night? It would be so nice. ‘Tell him we’re all very fond of him.’ Not only did I mention this invitation to Chalmers himself, I was rash enough to press the point. ‘After all, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. Really, you behave as if they’d eat you … When you got there, you’d probably enjoy it.’ At this, he became angry; we had our first serious quarrel—a long, heated argument, in the course of which I maintained that ‘one’s got to cultivate one’s social side’; an unluckily chosen phrase, which he sarcastically brought up against me on many future occasions. I was angry, too—with myself, chiefly; as I was manoeuvred, step by step, into an absurdly false position. I found myself actually defending the Poshocracy against Chalmers’ attacks; and finally, against the very charges I had brought against them, only an hour earlier, myself. Next morning, peace was tacitly declared. From that day onwards, my flirtations with the ‘nice’ world became fewer and fewer. I still attended occasional coffee parties and play-readings, but always guiltily and with humorous apologies to Chalmers. ‘Oh yes,’ he would say, ‘I’m well aware I’ve wrecked your social chances.’
The college tutor had sent a very courteous reasonable reply to my letter. He understood perfectly my position, he appreciated my frankness, he welcomed the opportunity of discussing my difficulties. At the same time, he was sorry not to be able to agree with me. The change I proposed—from the Historical to the English Tripos—appeared to him to be not in my own best interests. Further, I must remember that, as a scholar of the college, mine was a special case; if I had certain privileges, I had also certain responsibilities. The tradition of the college was against such changes, and he found himself, unfortunately, unable to decide that the occasion had come to break with that tradition. After I had taken the first part of the Tripos, we might, of course, discuss the matter further. In the meanwhile, he relied upon me not to disappoint the very considerable expectations which my papers in the scholarship examination had aroused.
So that was that. The decision of the college authorities hadn’t upset me unduly at the time; for Cambridge was then still remote on the horizon, nearly nine months ahead. But now here I was gowned, seated uneasily on the edge of the chair, reading my first essay aloud to my history tutor, the dreaded Mr Gorse. The subject of the essay was: ‘Better England F
ree than England Sober.’ I had finished it with some pride: it exactly suited my idea of Mr Gorse’s requirements—snappy, epigrammatic, a bit daring in its language, sprinkled with witticisms borrowed unacknowledged from Mr Holmes. Only now, for some reason, all my effects seemed to have gone wrong: the verbal fireworks were damp; the epigrams weren’t epigrams but platitudes, pompous, painfully naive, inept and priggish. It was positive misery to have to utter them. I writhed with embarrassment, coughed, made spoonerisms, gabbled through the worst bits with my face averted: ‘Apart from this consideration, there is no doubt that our own liquor restrictions are demoralizing … The places where it is sold are unpleasant, and the upper classes, disdaining them, repair to their own homes, where they are no longer under the restraining eye of the world, and often fare badly in consequence …’ (Heavens, did I really write that? The sweat began to break out on my forehead.) ‘The French café, with its refinement, its high social status and its atmosphere of harmless gaiety’ (Phew) ‘is as far removed from the English pub as the hotel is from the brothel …’
‘How do you know,’ snapped Mr Gorse, ‘how far an hotel is removed from a brothel? Very often it is a brothel. Go on.’
I grinned nervously, and faltered through to the end. The last paragraph was particularly heavy going, because Mr Gorse had begun to drum with his fingers on the mantelpiece. ‘Yes, yes …’ he kept muttering: ‘Yes, yes …’ as though his impatience were increasing with every word. ‘Well,’ he told me, when, at last, I had finished: ‘I’ll say this for you—it’s not the work of an entirely uneducated fool.’ He paused. I grinned hopelessly; regarding him like a poodle which is going to be kicked. ‘Look here, Isherwood,’ he appealed to me abruptly, ‘don’t you yourself agree that it’s all tripe?’
Alarming as it was, there was something very attractive about Mr Gorse’s manner; he was so fidgety, so impetuous, so direct. Pale and fair-haired, his handsome, aggressively intelligent face was like the edge of a very sharp tool. He was still under thirty; and his violent abruptness made him seem younger, less sure of himself, than the smooth-voiced sophisticated undergraduates of the post-war generation, who accepted his lurid comments on their work with polite unruffled mock humility and ever so slightly raised eyebrows. If Mr Gorse, in his own ferocious way, seemed to like me, it was perhaps chiefly because he was glad to find somebody whom he could so easily reduce to a state of jelly. Oddly enough, he sometimes strongly reminded me of Chalmers.
We both agreed that we liked Gorse the best of the college dons. You could speak openly to him—if you dared; he was a human being. Once, he had said to Chalmers: ‘Does the history school seem worse to you than working in a bank?’ He didn’t expect an answer to such questions, they were his form of expressing sympathy. He had been in the trenches as an infantry officer, then joined the Air Force and nearly got himself killed in a crash. He said of the War: ‘It was bloody, but I’d do it again tomorrow’—a statement one seldom heard in 1923. He was a bad but stimulating lecturer; bad because he over-estimated the knowledge of his audience, and was continually making apologetic references to facts we had never heard of, as ‘all that stuff they tell you in the little books’ or ‘the things you learnt in the Lower Fourth’; stimulating, because constitutional history was obviously, for himself, a subject of vital and absorbing interest. When he lectured, he was terribly nervous.
I had not been in Cambridge a fortnight before I began to feel with alarm that I was badly out of my depth. The truth, as I now discovered for the first time, was that I was a hopelessly inefficient lecturee. I couldn’t attend, couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t take proper notes. In the great hall of the college, where many of our lectures were held, I could hardly keep my attention down to the subject for thirty seconds at a time; away it drifted, idly, like a child’s balloon, around the ring of bent studious faces, then rising, to the enormous windows, to the Holbein over the dais, to the portraits of former Masters and dead notables—a salmon-pink, sneering Orpen, a suave tailored Sargent, a de Laszlo, a Watts—then higher still, to the carved beams and rich-coloured shadows of the famous sixteenth-century roof. And all the while, the clear dry legal voice of the third greatest authority in Europe was explaining to us the exact shade of significance to be attached to a Latin word or phrase in the passage under discussion—page one hundred and forty-seven of Stubbs’ Select Charters. For me, it was a voice in a nightmare—the perfectly distinct voice speaking a known language which is nevertheless, because of some mysterious curse, totally unintelligible. Here were the precious minutes going by and with them my academic career, my whole future; it was twenty-five minutes to eleven already, and I alone among all my busily scribbling fellow students had not written a single word.
It was now that I truly discovered how much I owed to Mr Holmes. How adroitly, how tactfully he had hammered knowledge into our dreamy heads. How appetizingly he had served up the driest and stodgiest facts! He had always known which of us had not been following his explanations—a single trained glance at our faces was enough; and at once, tirelessly, without reproaches, he would begin again at the beginning, but from a slightly different angle, with fresh jokes, new epigrams and all sorts of minor variations, lest anybody should be bored. He seldom, if ever, dictated notes directly; yet everything he said was a subtle kind of dictation; his lessons were so well-planned, proceeding so logically from step to step, that note-taking was painlessly easy. The difference between a Holmes lesson and a Cambridge lecture was the difference between an intimate cabaret performance in a Paris boîte and a Salzburg festival production by Reinhardt; grave, magnificent, remote. The Reinhardt production was wonderfully impressive, but I missed the back-chat, the encores and the catchy tunes. Questions, of course, were allowed, but to raise one’s voice in that majestic room was to claim a part in the whole solemn performance, and nothing I could ever find to say seemed worthy of such a setting. So I just sat there, dull, moony and silent drawing meaningless pictures on an empty page.
During those first few weeks, I worried a good deal about the future. I even made some feverish attempts to pull myself together, to cover the lost ground in my spare time, to copy out other people’s notes. Then, by degrees, I ceased to bother at all. Nobody else bothered, why should I? The first part of the Tripos exam wasn’t till 1925; by that time, most likely, we should all be dead. As for the Mays, which was next summer, everyone agreed that it didn’t matter, anyhow. And in Cambridge there was so much to distract you from the sordid subject of work. There were the bookshops, where you could read for hours without being disturbed; the curiosity shops which no undergraduate can resist; the tea-shops full of sickly but delicious cakes. There were comic games of squash with a boy from my old preparatory school, and wild night-rides in Sargent’s car. There were the flicks with the films which were, even in those days, not silent, because the audience supplied the popping of champagne corks, the puffing of trains, the sound of horses’ hooves and the kisses. Above all, there was the private world which Chalmers and I had deliberately created for ourselves, a world which was continually expanding, becoming more absorbing, more elaborate, sharper and richer in detail and atmosphere, to the gradual exclusion of the history school, the Poshocracy, the dons, the rags, the tea-parties, the poker, the play-reading; the whole network, in fact, of personalities, social and moral obligations, codes of behaviour and public amusements which formed the outward structure of our undergraduate lives.
People frequently said to me: ‘I saw you and Chalmers in the street this morning. What on earth was the joke?’ For, when we were together, we were always laughing. The mere tones of Chalmers’ voice would start me giggling in anticipation, and I had only to pronounce some quite ordinary word with special emphasis in order to send him into fits. We were each other’s ideal audience; nothing, not the slightest innuendo or the subtlest shade of meaning, was lost between us. A joke which, if I had been speaking to a stranger, would have taken five minutes to lead up to and elaborate and explai
n, could be conveyed to Chalmers by the faintest hint. In fact, there existed between us that semi-telepathic relationship which connects a crossword puzzle-setter with his most expert solvers. Our conversation would have been hardly intelligible to anyone who had happened to overhear it; it was a rigmarole of private slang, deliberate misquotations, bad puns, bits of parody and preparatory school smut:
‘Ashmeade’s giving a political tea-party to six puss-dragoons from the Union.’
‘Let’s go in and j’en appelle it.’
‘No good. They’d only namby us off. It’d just be quisb.’
‘What are Ashmeade’s politics, anyway?’
‘He’s a lava-Tory.’
‘I met him, just now. He told me he’s reading The Living Corpse.’
‘The Living Corpse … I suppose that was a man who smoked?’
Our jokes were usually connected in some way with the college, the Poshocracy and the dons. The dons were, for us, utterly remote and unreal figures, like the bogies in a child’s book; indeed, we were careful to avoid contact with them (excepting Gorse) altogether, in order to maintain more completely our vision of the ‘two sides,’ ‘the combine’ directed expressly against ourselves. And, in addition to the actual living dons, we had invented an ideal, imaginary don, the representative of all his kind, to be our special enemy and butt. We named him Laily (which means ‘loathly’)—a word taken from a ballad in the Oxford Book.
Lions and Shadows Page 5
