by Alec Waugh
“Oh, Lord, is he really?” said Fletcher. “I suppose he will be full of rotten new theories, and he will probably want to make us work.”
“Well, I always give a master a good fortnight’s trial before I do any work for him,” said Tester; “at the end of that, I usually find his keenness has worn off. I bet he will be the same as all the rest.”
“I doubt it,” said Betteridge; “he is a man.”
“Well, whatever he is, he is going to have no effect on me,” said Gordon, with a finality that quite closed the question.
Chapter IV
Through a Glass Darkly
As often as not, it is mere chance that provides the most essentially important moments in our lives. It is easy to talk of the inevitable march of Fate, but more usually a chance word or look alters our entire outlook on life. And so it was that the course of Gordon’s whole career was suddenly changed into a different channel, at a moment when he was drifting placidly on the stream of a lax conventionality, and was frittering away all his opportunities for sheer lack of anything that would spur him on to a clearer conception of what life means.
During the whole of the term, Tester and Gordon had done their early morning preparation on the V. A green. As they had answered their names at roll, they would take out deck-chairs and cushions and luxuriously pass the three quarters of an hour before breakfast reclining back, putting the finishing touches to the evening’s work. It is a very beautiful spot, the V. A green. On three sides it is flanked with buildings; on the fourth is a low wall, which is used as an exit for nocturnal expeditions. It was under the V. A class-room that Gordon and Tester put their chairs. Opposite them was the grey library; beyond rose the Abbey, solemn and austere; on the left was the chapel and the long cloister leading to big school. In the early morning a great hush pervaded the place. The only sound was the faint tolling of the Almshouse bell. Between the Abbey and the library the sun rose in a blaze of glory.
On the last morning of the term Gordon and Tester lolled back in their comfortable chairs. Gordon was trying to learn his rep. for the exam, that morning. Tester was reading The Oxford Book of English Verse; the exams for the Sixth were over.
“Oh, damn this,” said Gordon. “I can’t learn the stuff.”
He flung the book down, and lay back watching the first rays of the sun flicker on the cold bronze of the Abbey.
“This has been a rotten term, you know,” he said at last.
“Yes?” said Tester. He was engrossed in poetry.
“Well, I got into the deuce of a row with Chief, and I never got my House cap, and I’ve broken it off with Jackson.”
Tester put down his book and sat up.
“Caruthers, you know you are wasting your time. Here are you with all your brilliance and your personality worrying only about House caps and petty intrigues, and little things like that. What you want to realise is that there is something beyond the aim of a Fernhurst career. You are clever enough; but poetry and art mean nothing to you.”
“Oh poetry, that’s all right for Claremont and asses like that, but what’s the use of it?”
“Oh, use, use! Nothing but this eternal cry about the use of a thing. Poetry is the sort of beacon-light of man. What’s wrong with you is that you’ve read the wrong stuff. It is all very well for a middle-aged man to worship Wordsworth and calm philosophy. But youth wants colour, life, passion, the poetry of revolt. Now look here, let me read you this, and then tell me what you think of it.”
“Oh, all right. Is it long?”
“No, not very.”
In a low, clear voice, Tester began to read the great spring Chorus in Atalanta, into which Swinburne has crowded all that he ever knew of joy and happiness. In everyone there lies the love of beauty—“we needs must love the highest when we see it”—but the pity is that so few of us are ever brought face to face with the really lovely, or perhaps, if we are, we come to it too late. Our power of appreciation has lain too long dormant ever to be aroused. And at school it is the common thing for boys to pass through their six years’ traffic without ever realising what beauty is. They are told to read Vergil, Tennyson and Browning, the philosophers, the comforters of old age, poets who “had for weary feet the gift of rest.” But boys never hear of Byron, Swinburne and Rossetti, men with big flaming hearts that cried for physical beauty and the loveliness of tangible things. As a result they drift out into the world, to take their place with the dull, commonplace Philistine who has made the House of Commons what it is.
But as Gordon heard Tester reading the wonderful riot of melody, which conjures up visions of rainbows, and far-receding sunsets, of dew gleaming like crystals in the morning, of water gliding like forgotten songs, a strange peace descended on him. He had not known that there could be anything so intensely beautiful. Over the great Abbey the sun was rising heavenwards; down the street past the Almshouses he heard the happy sound of a young girl laughing. The world was full of strange new things; there was a new meaning in the song of the blackbird, in the rustle of the leaves, in the whispering of the warm wind. And suddenly there came over him a sensation of how far he himself was below the splendour of it all. He had walked through life with blinded eyes; with dulled senses he had stared at the ground, while all the time the great ideal of beauty was shining from the blue mountains of man’s desire.
Tester had finished reading.
“Well what do you think of it?”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. I never dreamt of such music.”
“Yes, you see, masters grow old; they forget what it was like to be young; they want us to look at life through their spectacles, and, of course, we can’t. Youth and age is an impossible combination; we have to cut a way for ourselves, Caruthers, sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed. I’ve made a pretty fair mess of things, because I have gone on my own way; because I have had no one to guide me. I found little consolation in mature thought, and I am not one of the fools who has just taken things for granted; I strike out by myself. I want to find what beauty really is, and I shall find it by sifting out everything first. I have probed a good many things one way and another, some ugly, some beautiful. I have followed the course of Nature. After all, Nature is more likely to be right than an artificial civilisation. I follow where my inclinations lead me. I hate laws and regulations. As I’ve often said, I did not ask to come into this world, so I shall do as I please, and I think that I shall reach home all right in the end. Literature is a great sign-post!”
“Yes,” said Gordon simply. “I never imagined it before. Who wrote that, by the way?”
“Swinburne, the great pagan who was sick of the sham and pretence of his day, and cried for the glories of Rome. Look here, Caruthers, come down to Gisson’s afterwards, and as a memento of our year together in Study 1, just let me give you Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads. It’s great stuff; you’ll like it, and you’ll find there something a bit better than your caps and pots.”
Gordon did not answer. The sun had now risen high above the Abbey. Across the silence was wafted the cracked notes of the School House bell; there was a rush of feet from the studies. For a few minutes Gordon lay back in his chair quite quiet. A new day had broken on his life. The future opened out with wide promises, with possibilities of great things. For he had heard at last the call which, if ever a man hears it, he casts away the nets and follows after—the call of beauty—“which is, after all, only truth, seen from another side.”
Book III
Unravelling the Threads
“. . . and drank delight of battle with my peers.”
TENNYSON.
“Yet would you tread again
All the road over?
Face the old joy and pain—
Hemlock and clover?
Yes. For it still was good,
Good to be living,
Buoyant of heart and blood;
Fighting, forgiving.”
AUSTIN DOBSON.
“Oh! the hardest day was never then
too hard.”
LINDSAY GORDON.
Chapter I
Common Room Faces
Miracles do not happen, nor do sudden conversions. Man very rarely changes. What he is at the beginning, he is at the end; all that occurs is that at various stages of his journey he looks at life from a different point of view, or rather through a different pair of spectacles, for never on this earth do we really see things as they are. When Gordon found new influences at work upon him, when he discovered through literature that there is something higher than the ignoble monotony of the average individual routine, he did not suddenly change his whole way of life, and, “like a swimmer into cleanness leaping,” put out of sight behind him the things that had pleased him once. Right and wrong are merely relative terms. What was considered right in the days of Caesar spells social ostracism today. And there are a few who prefer to see life as the Romans saw it, and to follow the ideals of power and physical beauty. For such life is not easy. Yet we are not so much better than “when Caesar Augustus was Egypt’s Lord!” The question of what is really right and what is really wrong will never be satisfactorily decided, on this earth at any rate, for we cannot all wear the same spectacles for long. Temperament is all-powerful.
And Gordon made no attempt to settle the question. He did not suddenly feel a loathing for his former pleasures, but during the long summer holiday’s, as he bathed in the waters of English poetry, it seemed to him as if he had outgrown them, and cast them aside. Perhaps in the future they might momentarily appear beautiful once more, but he did not think that he would ever again wear them for very long, for they were, after all, little, insignificant, trivial, and contrasted poorly with the white heat of Byron’s passion, and the flaming ardour of Swinburne, that cried for “the old kingdoms of earth and their kings.” As he read on, while the summer sun sank in a red sea behind the gaunt Hampstead firs, read of the proud, domineering soul of Manfred, visualised the burst of passion that had prompted the murder in The Last Confession, felt the thundering paganism of the Hymn to Proserpine, he was overcome with a tremendous hatred for the system that had kept literature from him as a shut book, that had offered him mature philosophy instead of colour and youth, and tried to prevent him from seeking it for himself. So this is the way, he thought, the youth of England is being brought up. Masters tell us to fix all our energies on achieving school successes, and think of calf-bound prizes and tasselled caps all day long. No wonder that, if they bind us down to trivial things, we become like the Man with the Muck-Rake, and drift on with low aims, with nothing to help us to live differently from cattle. No wonder the whole common room is repeatedly shocked by the discovery of some sordid scandal.
Gordon’s soul was very arrogant and very intolerant, and it was rather unfortunate that, at a time when he was bubbling over with rebellion, Arnold Lunn’s novel, The Harrovians, should have been published, as no previous school story had done it stripped school life of sentiment, and a storm of adverse criticism broke out. Old Harrovians wrote to the papers, saying that they had been at Harrow for six years, and that the conversation was, except in a few ignoble exceptions, pure and manly, and that the general atmosphere was one of clean, healthy broadmindedness. Gordon fumed. What fools all these people were! When they were told the truth, they would not believe it. Prophets must prophesy smooth things, or else were not prophets. How was there ever going to be any hope of improvement till the true state of affairs was understood?
And then a sudden doubt came to Gordon. What if these old Harrovians were right? What if this man Lunn had depicted the life of the exceptional, not of the average boy? What then of Fernhurst? He had judged the book by his own experiences. Was it possible that his school was worse than other schools, and what was usual there, would be exceptional at Rugby, Eton and Winchester? He had been so proud of Fernhurst, with its grey cloisters and dreaming Abbey, with its magnificent Fifteen and fine boxers. He had cursed at the Public School system because he thought it had done harm to Fernhurst. What if Fernhurst and not the system were at fault? For several days this worried him.
One evening, however, during the last week of the holidays, a Mr Ainslie came to dinner. He had been a contemporary of Lunn’s at Harrow, and had himself been head of his house for two years. The conversation had drifted to a discussion of recent books: The Woman Thou Gavest Me, Sinister Street, The Devils Garden, Round the Corner.
“By the way, Gordon,” said Ainslie, “read that book, The Harrovians?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“What did you think of it?”
“I liked it very much—thought it was the finest school story I had ever read.” Gordon felt rather nervous. He was aware that he was on thin ice, and timidly blurted out: “But, sir, was it true to Harrow life?”
“Absolutely; and it’s as true to the life of any other Public School. They are all much the same, you know, at the root.”
An immense weight was lifted from Gordon’s mind.
“I thought so, sir, but such a lot of fellows wrote to the papers saying it was all rot, and I began to wonder if—”
“My dear Gordon, don’t you make any mistake about it. Lunn knows what he is talking about. But old Public School men shroud their school life in a mist of sentiment; so they forget what they really did. All they remember is how they ragged the ‘stinks’ master, and pulled off the Senior cricket cup. Why, when that new house master—oh, what’s his name, Lee? Well, at any rate, when he came to Lunn’s house he was slowly getting rid of undesirables for terms, actually for terms. Cayley was not the only one who had to go, and, of course, no one thought of anything but games. I got a schol. there from my prep., and I literally had to live it down. It took me some time, too. We want a good deal of improvement in this rusty old system.”
So after all it was the system that was at fault, not Fernhurst. . . Fairly contentedly he went back by the three-thirty from Waterloo; but as he saw the evening sun steeping the gravel courts in shadows, and watched the lights flickering behind the study panes, it came home to him with a poignant vividness that Fernhurst, which should have been a home of dreams and of ideas, had, by the inefficiency of a vacillating system, become immersed in petty intrigues, and was filled with a generation that was being taught to blind itself to the higher issues.
But in a moment he was caught up in the tear and bustle of an opening term. There was the rush to the notice-board to see what dormitory he was in, who were the prefects; then the hurried interview with the Chief, and the inevitable Health certificate. The meeting of the eight-ten from Exeter; prayers; the arrival of the last train; and finally sleep. The hold of tradition is very strong; in a few moments Gordon had flung aside his doubts and scruples. Arm-in-arm with Collins he rolled down to the day-room to look at the new boys. There were twelve of them in all, very frightened, very timid, huddled round the day-room fire, wondering what was before them.
“Well, Caruthers, what do you think of that lot?” said Collins, as they swaggered back again to the studies.
“Oh, not much; that fellow second from the left was not bad. What’s his name, oh yes, Morcombe. Believe me, he is some stuff.”
“Oh, I thought him rather a washed-out specimen, but, I say, that fat fellow looks rather a sport. You know, the man like a dormouse.”
“Oh yes, that podgy lad. Morgan, he is Welsh, I know about him. He was captain of the prep, last year at football—not a bad forward, I believe. Oh, but there’s Lovelace—Lovelace.”
“Hullo, Caruthers.”
In a huge brown coat, Lovelace charged across from the porter’s lodge. “Had any cricket? What price Middlesex—below Hants, rotten county—you should watch Leicester now.”
“Oh, dry up, Middlesex has had bad luck this year.” The defeat at Lord’s by Worcester and Kent in the same week was a sore point with Gordon.
“Oh, did they? I call them rotten players. But, look here, who are pres?”
“Oh, Tester, Betteridge, Clarke, Mansell, all the whole cro
wd.”
“Good God, ‘some’ pres! Wait a sec. for me. I am only going to see Chief for a second. I am going to get confirmed, I think. I heard you get off some work for it. Half a sec.”
Back to the old life again. Nothing was changed. The same talk, the same interests, all the old things the same. Only he was altered. He felt as if he wanted to stand on the Abbey tower, and shout aloud that the School was wasting its opportunities, and was struggling blindly in the dark, following will-o’-the-wisps. And yet, for all that, he would not have Lovelace, or Mansell or any other of his friends the least bit different. He did not know what he wanted. It was better to let them go on as they were. As it had been, it would be. He could not do much, and at the moment he decided that, whatever he might think or feel, he would outwardly remain the same. The world was not going to look at his soul. He would go on as he had begun, putting things behind him as he outgrew them, and as they appeared childish to him. Only a very few should ever see him as he really was. The rest would not understand him, they would think him strange, unnatural; and he did not want that.
The first few days passed quickly. The entrance of Ferrers, the new master, into the placid Fernhurst atmosphere caused a mild sensation. The school first saw him walking across the courts after the masters’ meeting on the first day of term. His walk was a roll; he talked at the top of his voice; his left arm sustained a pile of books; his right arm gesticulated wildly.
“Good Gawd,” said Tester, “what a bounder.”
“Maybe, but he’s the sort of man to wake up the school,” said Betteridge.
“Isn’t it rather like applying a stomach-pump to a man who is only fit for a small dose of Eno’s Fruit Salt?”
“Nous verrons”
And in the bustle of a new term Ferrers was forgotten.
