The Third Hour

by Geoffrey Household

  He was born in Bath in the year 1900. His father was a solicitor with a moderate but highly respectable practice among the retired civil servants, army officers and Anglo-Indians of the town; his mother, to whom it was a continual comfort that the Mannings were listed in the local directory under the heading “resident gentry” rather than the less distinguished “general,” was the daughter of a small Bristol manufacturer. Both were fair and florid Anglo-Saxons, but their family trees were rooted so deep in the west country that neither was surprised when their only son appeared with the straight black hair, the long head and dusky violet-grey eyes of the pre-Celtic Mediterranean race—a common enough sport in the west of England and usually, in the year 1900, ascribed to a variety of romantic and improbable causes. Mrs Manning threw out guarded hints that an ancestress of hers had yielded—how delicately, and but once only, and that out of sheer feminine pity—to a shipwrecked grandee of the Spanish Armada.

  His mother, jealously possessive, dressed her growing son in quaint sailor suits with long trousers, in summer of starched white duck that scratched him, for the other nine months of the year of heavy serge that stifled his activity. She took him to dancing classes where he was the only boy among twenty little girls, and made him show off his new-learned tricks at tea parties. Her guests, fluffy and conventional wives of Bath, declared him sweet, as they did also Mrs Manning’s pug dog who performed no less obediently with a lump of sugar on his nose. At the time these were merely minor tribulations to Toby and the pug dog. Both were utterly happy. Both adored Mrs Manning. Nor indeed could any woman so blandly unconscious of offence be blamed because Toby talked loudly to himself and the pug dog, its natural instincts upset, died of mistaking cascara pills for comfits.

  A very saint of gentleness, Mr Manning gave way on all occasions to the demands of his wife. Since she was a correct provincial woman living on second-hand emotions and codes of behaviour, her husband had sunk into the stagnant waters of unreality and was unable either to act on his own ideas or to accept hers. Outside his office he was lost, and looked to his son for the companionship that he was too melancholy to find elsewhere. The relationship between the man and the small boy was thus a real seeking for each other’s spirit and healthy for both. It saved Mr Manning from loneliness; it corrected Toby’s tendency to dream.

  As befitted one of his generation, the solicitor read and wrote the classical languages with ease. More surprisingly, he also read and wrote French, Spanish and Italian, and delighted to find in his books passages that would be intelligible to his son, either translating as he read or retelling the story as the two tramped over the Somerset hills. When Toby went off to his preparatory school at the age of nine he had a long ungainly stride, due to keeping step with his father, and a broad background of general knowledge.

  The school was a grey manor house on the wind-swept Isle of Purbeck and no place for a romantic and innocent child, since he was bound to retain intact both innocence and romanticism. It was too close to a boy’s heaven to be truly preparatory to life. In spring, armed with murderous axes and billhooks, they were allowed to descend upon the woods like a lodge of beavers, building themselves houses of brushwood and damming the streams. In summer they swam naked among the rock ledges and caves of the Purbeck coast and their bellies ran blood from the shallow painless scratches of the limpet shells. In winter, and at any time when rain kept them indoors, they roller-skated at reckless speed around the schoolroom and, squatting together like bobsleigh teams, down the long stone corridor and hairpin bend that led to the dining hall. There were never any accidents. It was as if O’Connor, headmaster and proprietor of the school, were as extensive in spirit as in body and could stretch out a protecting arm, even in absence, over his little ones.

  O’Connor treated his sixty charges as the cheerful barbarians they were. He was a born teacher and impatient with all theories of education; indeed he had only to be told a theory in order to do exactly the opposite. He stormed at his boys in great gargantuan phrases which they loved even as they trembled. He beat them frequently and would march from dormitory or schoolroom to his study with a struggling boy, midway between tears and laughter, under each arm. He was unreasonable, uproarious, tender and efficient as a first-class gamekeeper with a litter of spaniel pups.

  A bigoted conservative, O’Connor was a believer in democracy so long as it did not disturb the powers and privileges of the oligarchs, and an enthusiastic amateur of international affairs. His boys knew how and why the Balkan Wars were fought and where and why the new frontiers ran. They had the Agadir crisis at their fingertips. They could give a clear account of the balance of power in Europe and the aims of the three continental empires. Toby had just time to feel himself a European before nationalism destroyed Europe, and to behave as a conscious part of the well-ordered Edwardian world.

  On July 31st, 1914, Toby waited on Dorchester station for the train that would take him to join his parents for their annual summer holiday at Lyme Regis. He had that morning left O’Connor’s for good. He was not sad, for the golden day shimmering over the rich Dorset landscape promised well for the eight idle weeks before him, and he was proud of the initiation to manhood which the mere act of leaving his preparatory school implied. The frieze of posters around the station bookstall was alarming: “TSAR’S APPEAL TO THE KAISER. FRANCE MOBILISES. GRAVE WARNING TO GERMANY. ANOTHER BALKAN SCARE?” Toby paced the platform gravely as befitted a citizen of a vast and to him unchallengeable empire for the governing of which he had begun, in embryo, his training. He was excited but could not imagine war. He had been brought up on one war scare after another, and against all of them the common sense of statesmen had prevailed. Restlessly he left the station and began to explore the streets of Dorchester. He deliberately missed his connection, ordered himself some lunch in a restaurant and took an afternoon train to Lyme Regis. It was a gesture of freedom, very belated but, as Toby’s personal revolutions were always to be, final and absolute once accepted.

  At the end of September Toby entered Chesterfield, a public school in the midlands of comparatively modern foundation but already famous for the muscularity of its bishops and the piety of its soldiers. He did his best to like the place; he did not mind the strict discipline; he prided himself on being an obedient fag; he tolerated his housemaster and venerated the four prefects who governed the house of fifty boys with kindly, rough justice and only brought tears to his eyes when four years later he entered all their names in the final list of “Killed in Action.” He found it difficult, however, to adjust himself to the lack of liberty and missed any sort of intelligent communing with his fellows. During his last term at O’Connor’s he had begun to discuss abstract subjects with his fellows as they strolled homewards from the sea over the short, turf of the Dorset cliffs, and once with another solemn thirteen-year-old had considered the possibility that there might be no God. At Chesterfield the small boys had apparently no interest in such speculations and certainly no time for them; it was the guiding principle of the school that the housemaster should know how every one of them was occupied at any given moment of the day. Their thinking was supposed to be done in the form room.

  After a year and a half at Chesterfield Toby was disliked by his fellows as a prig, by his form masters as a slack young idiot who refused to use his brains, and by Mr Thrupp, his housemaster, for these and two other reasons: that, though he had been sulkily confirmed, he refused to attend Holy Communion; and that even Chesterfield had not yet devised a way of compelling him to do so. The only comforting report that Mr Manning had ever received on his son was from a French master who, after dutifully recording Toby’s inattention, added “appears to take great pains with his pronunciation.”

  He hated to be an outcast but helplessly accepted his position. Slow on his feet and clumsy, he was little use at games, the short cut to respect. Since there was no manifestation of intellectual life, such as a debating or dramatic society, that longer r
oute was also denied to him. In an agony of inferiority he analysed the make-up of his community through the first half of the summer term 1916, and observed that there was yet another path to the respect of his fellows. Mr Thrupp might drool through his huge moustache a fortnightly pi-jaw on evil communications—“or what you boys call dirty talk”—but evidently the resplendent young second-lieutenants who visited their old school and produced loud guffaws in the studies of those whom they delighted to honour did not agree with him. It was necessary to have some knowledge of the workings of sex and to use them as a basis for conversation.

  Toby’s sexual education had been sadly neglected. When he was eight Mrs Manning had delivered an incoherent lecture on the behaviour of flowers, which left him only with a vague sense of distaste caught from the repressions of his mother. Before he left O’Connor’s that magnificent man, following his usual practice, had summoned him to his study and asked him whether he knew the facts of life. He had answered out of his supreme innocence that he did, thereby missing a highly original explanation of them. His housemaster when preparing him for confirmation made the same enquiry and Toby gave the same reply—this time aware of his ignorance but consciously loathing the man’s approach to any subject of importance.

  He asked the essential questions of a friend, and humbly received the answers, scornful, coarse, but perfectly accurate. They enabled him to coördinate his disjointed knowledge and gave meaning to various uncomprehended jests that were slowly rotting in the game bag of his memory. He recounted one of them to a group of his fellows at the first opportunity—they were lying on the grass watching an interminable cricket match—and was greeted by stares of surprise and then by most satisfying laughter. By evening it was all over the house that Manning had told a dirty joke, and by the end of the term he had half a dozen intimate friends and was known as not at all a bad sort of fellow after all. Mr Thrupp was quick to notice the subtle change in the attitude of his house to Toby, and added to a sound report: “I notice a general improvement in his morality, and believe that he is beginning to be fit for responsibility.”

  In 1917 Toby was promoted to the Sixth Form, and assumed the duties and privileges of a prefect. He was considered by the small boys under him as a just but disreputable god who had strayed unaccountably into their Olympus, and by his contemporaries as an easy-going fellow without proper pride in his house or school, to be tolerated for the sake of his loyalty and impropriety. Mr Thrupp regarded him with misgiving, for he was obviously a disturbing influence and most annoyingly without the regular paedo-eroticism to which the regular safeguards might be applied; he also felt that any boy who took so much interest in the languages of foreigners was un-English and unreliable. The headmaster of Chesterfield, who thought Toby brilliant, which he was not, and deserving more latitude, which he did, reserved judgment and hoped for the best.

  Toby’s inner life at this period was entirely dominated by his passionate delight in two discoveries: that literature which was supposed to be great was really great; and that young females took as much interest in their bodies as he did. He went his own way, fitting a clandestine personal life into the communal pattern of the school. The wooded hills that surrounded Chesterfield were the scenes of his truest development. There he read, for thus he could smoke while finding his father in Anatole France’s Monsieur Bergeret or contrasting the philosophy of Chesterfield with that of Schopenhauer; there he picked up the girls of the neighbouring county town and gained understanding of a class different from his own while satisfying his hunger for their still innocent but warm embraces. The only official activity which he took seriously was the Officers’ Training Corps. Since he was certain to be commanding a platoon in France within a year, the drills and field days seemed to him the most practical and immediate duties of his education.

  Toby would have been called up in December 1918. Now that the armistice had deprived him of the whole apparent object of his existence, he was compelled to spend two more terms at school before going up to Oxford. It seemed reasonable that his father should disapprove of his idling away nine months in Bath, and Toby, since Chesterfield had omitted to teach him to plan his own life, had no alternative suggestion to offer. Returning to school, he became a conscious rebel, unashamed of his lawlessness.

  Punishment followed on insolence, not swiftly but with due and decent warnings that he ignored. In the Easter term Mr Thrupp, prowling at midnight through his boys’ studies in the hope of discovering cigarettes, obscene literature or cribs to Caesar’s Gallic Wars, was filled with pleasurable indignation at finding a bottle of whisky, a quarter full, hidden too casually behind his head prefect’s books. The headmaster, who had surprisingly preserved scholarship and humanity through forty years of various public schools, pointed out that if Manning had left Chesterfield in December he would be consuming a great deal more than three-quarters of a bottle of whisky in six weeks. He was content to depose Toby from the Upper to the Middle Sixth—a mere gesture of disapproval—and Mr Thrupp blew the remains of his breakfast egg off his moustache and consoled his own dignity by delivering to the culprit three pompous lectures on intemperance.

  At the beginning of the summer term he fell from the ruling classes of Chesterfield to a mere member of the proletariat. He was caught by a young master talking to a girl in the woods; a very grave offence. Had he been recognised five minutes earlier he would undoubtedly have been expelled with ignominy; but he had fortunately thrown his coat and cap into a bush and the only visible part of him carried no school colours. The master did not realise that the boy saying an apparently tender farewell was identical with the upper half of that pastoral idyll from which he had hastily looked away.

  Nemesis fell on him three weeks later when Mr Thrupp, enraged at an overlong and unexpected occupation of his private lavatory, broke down the door and discovered his head prefect. Though he looked innocent enough, the aroma of pipe smoke was damning evidence against him. It was bad luck, for Toby had used the place for many terms as a smoking den whenever he knew that his housemaster was safely engaged in school.

  The fuming Thrupp incontinently sent off a telegram to Mr Manning:—

  “your son smoking pipe my watergloset must request you instantly withdraw him,” in which his desire for economy led to some ambiguity. Mr Manning, horrified at Toby’s crescendo of misdeeds and unwilling to believe that the final blow had fallen, tried to persuade himself of several meanings to the telegram. Toby, he suggested, had only been guilty of a boyish prank in smoking out Thrupp’s waste pipes with some unpleasant chemical. They possibly needed it and, as a lawyer’s son, Toby would have a sturdy resentment of nuisances. In protest at Thrupp’s rebuke, he ventured to submit, Toby had locked himself in and refused to withdraw without his father’s consent.

  Mrs Manning, however, refused to allow her husband any illusions. Her intellectual equipment was close to that of Mr Thrupp and her understanding of him instinctive. She dressed herself appealingly, caught the first train to Chesterfield and appeared in the guise of a shattered mother puddled with tears. Thrupp, a connoisseur of fine attitudes, was deeply moved, but adamant. The headmaster murmured unhappily that periods of unrest inevitably succeeded great wars, and, terrified lest she should fall on her knees in his study, agreed to save Toby the stigma of official expulsion and to permit him to return home as indisposed.

  The adult Toby judged that on the whole he should be grateful to Chesterfield. It had developed his body into a reliable machine of great endurance and rapid recovery from strain, and it had not actually prevented him from developing his mind. Most valuable legacy of all, he was able to comfort himself at the worst periods of his life with the thought that Chesterfield had been a more deadly imprisonment than any combination of adverse circumstances.

  His three years at Oxford seemed on looking back to have been an eventless period of paradise. He did no work whatever and attended no lectures. During vacation, however, he found
little to do in Bath but read, and covered most of the literature prescribed and much that was not. To the amazement of friends who had shared the undisturbed current of his idle hours, he took a First in Modern Languages.

  The lists of his year were crowded with men of intelligence equal to his own, who had also taken honours in the less monastic school of war. He had not a chance of entering the government services into which he would normally and unthinkingly have passed. Toby had never pictured himself in business—indeed he had hardly considered at all the means by which he would ultimately support himself. It was an unimportant point. Both he and his father assumed that something fitting would turn up. His mother, incurably romantic, hoped for him either a brilliant career in the Foreign Office or picturesque blackguardism in the colonies. It was a grievous disappointment to her when he became a bank clerk. She explained to her cronies that Toby had gone in for International Finance, and for once was not very far from the truth.

  The Danube & Ottoman Trading Corporation Ltd. offered to train him at their Vienna office for a managership, and gave him the excellent salary of £500 a year. It was a magnificent opportunity. The Danube & Ottoman believed, as a matter of faith rather than reason, that the little countries with neither exports, gold nor buying power would be able to take the place of the great economic federations of pre-war history, and poured out capital through their branches into the new states of Europe and the Levant.