Thirteen Such Years

by Alec Waugh

  I did, however, in an attempt at emulation head the batting averages. For Martin Paul was not by any means exclusively an aesthete. Had his eyes been stronger he would, I think, have been a more than average county batsman. At the time I was convinced that he would have been a test match player. He was short; not more than five foot seven; and he had the technique of the short man; late cuts, and hooks, and slash shots through the covers. His late cut seemed to me sheer magic. His wrists would dab down on the ball as it passed the wicket, sending it like a streak past second slip. I was bitterly resentful when my headmaster refused to let me imitate the shot, insisting that I should cut off the left foot. I longed for the day when I should be free to bat in my own style or rather to model my style on Paul’s. I imagined I was paying Spooner a compliment when I told him that his batting reminded me of Martin Paul’s.

  It was three years before I was to see Paul again. I was then on the brink of my school eleven. He had come down to play against us for the Free Foresters. He was changed; or it may have been that I was seeing him through changed eyes. There is a wide gulf between the boy of thirteen and the adolescent of sixteen. Paul was less flamboyant. His hair was shorter and less glossy. His trousers were pressed, his coat relatively new. He wore a loose collared cream silk shirt with a college tie. He had fattened slightly. His voice was slower, less eager, more authoritative. He was a don at Wadham. His rooms were one of the few places in Oxford where the hearties and the aesthetes could meet on equal terms. His manner was a little patronising; as a man’s tends to be when he spends a great deal of time in the company of his juniors. But he knew how to interest his juniors.

  He made a pretty good fifty against us in under three quarters of an hour, but his batting meant less to me now that I could cut late off the right foot myself, in the same way that his clothes were less enthralling now that I had a wardrobe of my own, a trouser press and a silk hat. But though the glamour that he held for me was different, it was glamour still. Modern literature was an opening and entrancing book for me. I was half way through Carnival and was eagerly awaiting the second instalment of Sinister Street. I had read Brooke’s poetry and thought that I understood James Stephens. At school there were only two masters with whom I could discuss a poet more recent than Rossetti. Martin Paul could not only talk of modern books, he knew their authors. At my preparatory school he had dazzled me by casual references to “Plum” Warner and Maurice Bird. Now he talked lightly of “Monty” Mackenzie and “Willie” Maugham. At my preparatory school I had dreamed of the day when I could use brilliantine, wear grey silk ties, play cricket for Middlesex and have dinner afterwards with Albert Troth. Now I pictured the day when I could sit a silent undergraduate in Paul’s rooms, while W. L. George and Gilbert Cannan argued about the future of the novel.

  Martin Paul focussed ambition for me. He was and did what I hoped one day myself to be and do. He still had that appeal for me when I met him four years later in an estaminet behind the line; not at first when we talked the ordinary military shop, about the last offensive and the next; nor later when we talked of literature and he described amusingly a meeting he had had on his last leave with Lascelles Abercrombie;—I no longer felt, having since I had seen him last written two novels and got one published, that a literary debate between George and Cannan constituted a supreme experience, but afterwards when the other two officers who had been with us rose from his table with a knowing wink and a remark that they had business up the village.

  It was very clear where the two officers were going.

  Paul shrugged his shoulders.

  “If it amuses them they’re welcome to it, I suppose, but how anyone can see anything but hygiene in that kind of thing…”

  For myself, innocent of experience, that kind of thing had the appeal of the forbidden and the unknown. My attitude was one of thrilled anticipation, of “fear contending with desire.” Paul’s indifference impressed me.

  “Most fellows seem to be thrilled by it,” I said.

  “Not after they’ve had one real experience. That spoils it for them. And even a real experience has to have the setting made just right for it. I don’t know if I’m getting middle-aged but I’m beginning to think that things are always a bit squalid and promiscuous outside marriage.”

  “What do you mean by the setting being just right?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. When the moment’s islanded, I suppose. Two people meeting on a ship or in some quiet village, when they know that in a few days they’ll each have to go separate ways. There’s a week, a month, a fortnight that they can devote completely to each other. Then they go.”

  As he spoke, all the old glamour that he had had for me came back. I saw him not as an athlete or an aesthete but as a lover. He was not the man to slink round the corner to some grubby stew. He was a man who had been loved by women. “If I don’t ask questions,” I thought, “if I just lead him quietly, he’ll tell me everything.”

  “Do you think it can often happen that way?” I said.

  “To most men, once.”

  “If I were writing a story, I wonder what setting would be best,” and I began to suggest one or two settings clumsily, waiting for the moment when he would tire of my blundering, when he would tell me his own story; in the same way that as my schoolmaster he had grown impatient with my attempt to arrange dactyls and spondees in the right sequence, had taken the pencil from my hand, saying, “Surely you must see this is the way it goes.”

  I talked on, waiting for his interruption.

  It came, prefaced as I had expected by a laugh.

  “My dear fellow, you call yourself a novelist and you can’t devise a better plot. How’s this? I make a present to you of it. There’s a young Oxford undergraduate. He’s on his way to Munich; in the long vac: he’s going to freshen up his German. He’s waiting at the Gare du Nord for his train to start. He’s walking up and down the platform. As he passes the news stand there’s a voice that makes him check his stride. It’s like gold. There’s an American pitch to it. He looks at her. She is the loveliest person he has ever seen. He asks himself, ‘Is she coming by his train?’ He stands breathless. She buys her papers. She turns away to the train on the other platform. He hesitates. He is twenty-one. She says something to the travel agent. Her voice decides him. In two minutes he has moved his suitcase from his train to hers; to the luggage rack above her head. A guard comes down the corridor. The young man explains that he has lost his ticket. The guard asks where he is going. He hesitates. He looks at the hat box on the seat beside him. It is labelled Rome. ‘Rome,’ he replies. There is a twinkle in his companion’s eyes as the guard leaves them.

  “‘Do you always,’ she asks, ‘have your luggage labelled Munich when you go to Rome?’

  “She is an actress on her way to Rome to see whether a part in an Italian play would suit her. Within a week she must return to London.

  “‘I was so angry at having to come,’ she says. ‘I was expecting to be so bored. It looks now as though it might be rather fun.’

  “That’s the right setting for that kind of thing,” said Paul. “Two people meeting romantically, knowing that they have to separate, accepting the moment for what it is: as one accepts a flower, knowing it’ll wither. An island in an ocean; an oasis in a desert.”

  There was no need for him to elaborate the picture. With my mind’s eye I could see it all. Those two in a strange city, existing in and for each other.

  “But wouldn’t they find it hard to establish things on another basis when they got back to London?” I asked. “How shall I end the story?”

  “By making the play in London fail. By sending her back to America, before he had returned from Germany.”

  Yes, that would be the fitting end. With such wide eyes as I had turned to him in boyhood I looked across the estaminet table. He was heroic to me. He was the kind of man to whom the perfect love affair would come: Coupé net en plein ardeur, without the misery of a final parting, since
they would part in the belief that they would soon meet again; with the knowledge of finality coming later when he had got acclimatised to separation. The perfect love affair.

  “And you never saw her again?” I asked.

  He smiled at that.

  “It’s a long time ago,” he said. “No, I never saw her. I had a chance once. She came to London only a few months ago. But, oh well, she was older than I was. I was such a child then. I might have felt differently. I wanted to keep my picture of her.”

  I nodded in agreement. How right he had been. How right he always was. In the same way that at a preparatory school I had dreamed of the day when I could use brilliantine and make late cuts, and as a public school boy I had pictured the day when I should listen to established novelists discussing literature, so as a subaltern in an estaminet in Arras I wondered whether for me too there would come a day when love would be an island in an empty ocean; lingered beside and dreamt of, but returned to never.

  §

  It was twelve years before I saw Paul again. He wrote to me from Oxford to ask if I would recommend the manuscript of a pupil to my publisher. We corresponded. His letters were friendly. I had so often thought about him. I asked if we could not have a meal together next time he came to London. It was agreed that he should dine at my flat and that afterwards he should take me to a theatre.

  The sight of him was a shock. I had always seen him, one way or another, in terms of glamour. I was unprepared for the short, plump, grey-haired, quiet man who spoke in a slow tired voice about “you young writers.” He had married, he told me, in the last year of the war. He had three children. He lived in North Oxford; bicycling in each morning to the lectures; taking private pupils, writing an occasional review for the Times Literary Supplement. He had edited an anthology of the silver poets. I imagined that life must be a struggle for him financially. His private income, never large, had probably been reduced during the war. But he did not give the impression of a beaten man. He was tired. Not with the exhaustion of defeat, but as a man who is fulfilled; who has done what he set out to do; and has left the arena. I could see no sign of the figure that had dazzled me. The dilettante, the athlete, the lover, they had gone. Their place was taken by a classic acceptance and resignation. He was not fretting as were so many others against the loss of youth. Whatever else scholarship does not give, these it most surely does: a sense of distance, of proportion; a refusal to overvalue what is immediate and lies to hand. Those who live or have been grounded in an atmosphere of antiquity; old buildings, old names, the literature of Greece and Rome are not over-elated by success, or easily overthrown by failure. Paul was deep-rooted. I respected him as before I never had.

  I asked him what play we were going to that night.

  “I’ve seats for Wyndham’s. I hope you haven’t been.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’m so glad. I was particularly anxious to see that play,” he hesitated. “You probably won’t remember my telling you about how I met an actress on the way to Rome. She’s acting in this piece.”

  “But I thought you wanted to keep your picture of her.”

  He smiled.

  “That’s so long ago. I’m not romantic any longer. I’m inquisitive.”

  She was an actress who was little known in England. She had only appeared once or twice and then with no great success. I had never seen her act. I was curious to see her. But more curious to see what effect the sight of her would have on Paul. It was twenty years since he had seen her.

  That curiosity remained indeed the play’s chief interest for me. It was a poorish piece. But about the central actress there could be no doubt whatever. She was exquisite. She must have been close on fifty; but she looked at the oldest in the late thirties. Her figure was as slim and supple as a girl’s; her voice had the golden tone that Paul had heard in Paris twenty years ago. How is one to explain that miracle by which certain women in part through the skill of science, but more through an indomitable youthfulness of heart contrive to defy the almanack? It was as difficult to believe that she was nearly fifty as it was to believe that Paul was only forty. To him she must have seemed the same woman that he had said goodbye to: it must have been like his youth coming back to meet him.

  When she came on to the stage, he gave a gasp. Right through the piece, he sat rigid, entranced, not speaking and not moving.

  “I’m going round to see her afterwards,” he said.

  There was no talk now of his wanting to keep his picture of her. I wondered as we walked round to the stage door whether she would remember him. One cannot tell what one has meant in a woman’s life. What was the grand moment of one’s life to her may have been an episode. And vice versa. But the doorkeeper brought back the message instantly. “Yes, Miss Grantham would be delighted to see Mr. Paul at once.”

  “You’d better come too,” said Paul.

  As the doorkeeper shuffled down the stairs Paul turned to a small mirror in the passage to arrange his tie. He hesitated. I could only guess what he was thinking of. But the face that stared back at him from the mirror was not the face Joan Grantham would remember. Between that last night in Rome and now lay the great gulf of war. On Paul was written deep in the lost line of chin, the puffed eyelids, the blue-veined nostrils, all that that gulf had meant. The reflection recalled him to reality. For three hours he had been living in a dream. His youth had been brought back to him. But he was no longer the person who could meet it.

  Twenty years ago he had meant youth to her: freshness, bouyancy, adventure; whereas now… He turned away. In his eyes as they met mine was that new look of resignation.

  “No, no,” he said. “I’d rather leave her with the picture of me.”

  §

  Martin Paul is to me a more typical post-war figure than John Chagford. With twenty years of living concentrated into five, he was drained and exhausted at a time when he should be potential, fresh, ambitious. He is not unhappy. He has had his good years. He grew middle-aged before his time. But he has accepted that fact as a scholar and a classic. He is self-fulfilled. To the philosophic mind the desire to act passes with the capacity to perform. His refusal to face a once-loved woman is symbolic of at least a section of his generation.

  §

  There was not only exhaustion in post-war Europe: there was as well a sense of aimlessness. Life was varied, amusing, but undirected.

  The Victorian rationalists had destroyed the simple religious faith that in some form or another had guided men since history’s dawn. The earth was no longer seen as a vast schoolroom in which you received marks for virtue and crosses for impiety: in which you were rewarded by heaven or punished by hell. Conduct in this world was not appraised by its probable reception in the next. The ideal of a material citizenship was substituted. The Edwardian was educated to leave the world a little better than he found it. Progress, property and power were his watchwords.

  That belief was destroyed during the war. Empire meant ownership no longer. A country’s glory is not now assessed by the possessions owned by that country; the wealth owned by the vested interests of that country, by the power to which that wealth entitles the country’s ministers in the world’s councils; by its soldiers’ capacity to dominate unweaponed Asiatics, but by the standard of living and the degree of culture enjoyed by the inhabitants of that country.

  Property is suspect since property excites the indulgence of possessive instincts that in their turn are an excitant to war. The urge to increase property has gone, with the last faith in the reality of property itself. The savings of a lifetime can be lost in half an hour. Currencies collapsed. German marks were sold by the million in the Strand. The value of the franc declined to twopence. The inducement to build for a future generation was weakened. The very structure of life was unstable.

  If those who returned to peace in expectation of a perpetual week-end leave were disappointed, those were equally so who had talked of the war that would end war: of a world saved for democra
cy. Because Geneva housed a League of Nations competition did not yield to cooperation. The war was the largest enterprise that had ever been undertaken by mankind. Billions of pounds were spent, millions of lives were lost, yet at the end of it the world was very much what it had always been: possibly a little grubbier, with money less equally and less worthily distributed among a class vulgarised by quick success that had not yet learnt how to spend it. But in its essentials the old world was very little altered: with the old ideals or absence of ideals; with self-interest the determining factor in public as in private life. Progress, property, power, the three watchwords of Victorian England had lost their meaning, and no satisfactory watchwords had replaced them.

  §

  There was recruited into the army in the closing months of the war a man who insisted on knowing the reason for every command that was given him. “Step off,” the sergeant shouted, “with your left foot first.”

  “Why?” asked the recruit.

  “Don’t answer from the ranks,” the sergeant thundered.

  “Why?” came the reply.

  For three weeks, during whose greater portion he languished in the guard room, he continued this catechismal policy. At the end of those three weeks he was discharged. They could do nothing with him. You rarely can with a person who persists in asking questions. That was the trouble about Socrates. He went round Athens asking the question “Why?” and though he may have himself possessed an answer to his inquiries, he so confused his audiences, breeding in them so complete a distrust of the ideas and standards and beliefs by which their lives were governed that in self-defence the State was driven to condemn him. He disproved more than he proved. In the process he destroyed rapidly his pupils’ faith in the ultimate value of their actions. “If this,” we can imagine them to have said, “is worthless; and this, and again this, these things which from our childhood we have been educated to reverence, what is there left us to believe in?” A line of thought unquestionably subversive of the interests of a small state hedged round by enemies. If people began to think like that, nothing would get done, because no one would feel anything to be worth the doing.