The Loom of Youth

by Alec Waugh

  “Then you did it merely out of spite, I suppose. Do you consider that the football field is a suitable opportunity for the paying-off of old scores?”

  Now, suppose Gordon had poured out the story of how Felston had sworn to lay him out in the Three Cock, and how Hazlitt and others had flung the words “Three Cock” into his face for half a term, it would have been certainly an extenuation. But he realised that Hazelton was present. It would not be the proper thing, it would indeed be unpardonable cheek, for him to talk in the presence of the House captain as though his chances of playing in the Three Cock were to be taken for granted. It would be madness to imperil his chances on the football field, merely because he wanted an excuse for a silly little row.

  And so he did not answer.

  “Well, Caruthers, I sha’n’t want you any more. Thank you for being so frank in the matter. As far as I can see, it is the only extenuating circumstance. Harding, Hazelton, one minute.”

  Gordon returned to the studies amused rather than disconcerted. He quite saw that the Chief, with his high ideals, would refuse to allow two blacks to make a white, even if that black were of the grey-black shade of which colour boys were allowed to get their school suits made, and which produced anything from light grey to dark brown. He understood and respected the Chief’s point of view entirely. But with “the Bull” he was furious. No one but “the Bull” could have reported him; and, “the Bull” after all, was an old Fernhurstian. He knew the school customs, and unless his memory was decaying, must have remembered the wild way in which boys boast. He must have known it; but “for the sake of Fernhurst,” Buller would say, “this leprosy has to be rooted out.” Gordon began to wonder whether it was really a love of Fernhurst that was his standard for all actions, or simply a supreme egotism, which embraced alternately his own interest, his house’s interest, and Fernhurst’s interest, but never, under any circumstances, never the School House interest!

  Hazelton thought much the same. At the Chief’s request he made a characteristic speech to the House after prayers.

  “Someone who imagines himself a sportsman, and who refuses to disclose his name, but whose identity we can only guess at, has been making some silly remarks about certain play and behaviour in the House. Of course that is all rot. But people have strange ideas, especially those in authority, and we have to be very careful. So for heaven’s sake don’t go shouting out that you are going to lay everyone out. It only means a row, and, after all, you can do it just as well without talking about it.”

  There was a roar of laughter; the old system survived.

  Next morning in break Gordon passed Buller on his way to the tuck-shop. “The Bull” cut him dead.

  The day after, the Chief having made up his mind on the matter, told Gordon that his Sixth Form privileges had been taken away.

  Before a large crowd, in full view of Chief’s study window, Gordon that afternoon burnt his straw hat with the Sixth form ribbon on it, and stood over the smouldering ashes proclaiming in tragic tones: “The glory has departed from Israel.” His old passion for a theatrical piece of rodomontade was not yet subdued.

  * * * * *

  For a short time Gordon was rather worried about “l’affaire Hazlitt,” as Tester called it. But he soon forgot it entirely in the excitement of the approaching match. Everyone talked about it; there was no other topic of conversation. The night before the match Lovelace could not sit still for a minute. He strode up and down the study murmuring to himself: “We can’t lose; we can’t; we can’t!” Someone looked in to ask if he was going to prepare the Livy.

  “Livy?” he gasped. “Who could do any work the night before a house match?”

  The someone retired discomforted.

  “You know it’s absurd,” Lovelace went on, “for a master to imagine anyone could do work when the house matches are on. The other day Claremont had me up and asked me why my work had been so bad lately. I told him that the house matches were so exciting that I could not concentrate my mind on anything else. He looked at me vacantly and said: ‘Well, are they realty? I don’t know whom they excite; they don’t excite me.’”

  “Dear old poseur; he’s keen enough on his own house,” Gordon answered drowsily from the depths of the hammock, in which he had almost fallen asleep. He felt incapable of thought. For weeks he had looked forward to the match, and now it was so close he felt strangely languorous, tired in brain and body.

  Rain fell steadily all night, and though it cleared off about break, the ground was already under water. It was a cold, gusty day.

  By lunch the whole House was unbalanced. There was much loud laughter, then sudden silences; an atmosphere of restlessness lay over everyone. Very slowly the minutes dragged by. Gordon sat silent in a far corner of the pavilion. At last the whistle blew, the magenta and black jerseys trailed out on to the field. A cheer rose from the line.

  The next hour passed in a whirl of white jerseys, gradually turned black with mud, of magenta forms dashing on to the School forwards, of wild, inarticulate black insects bawling on the touch-line. The pervading impression was mud. Everything was mud; he was mud, the ball was mud. Lovelace was indistinguishable. His own voice leading the scrum seemed strangely unreal. There was a vague feeling of disquiet when, early in the first half, he found himself standing under the posts, while the Buller’s half placed the ball for Whitaker to convert. Nothing tangible; then the disquiet passed, the magenta jerseys swept forward, dirty white forms came up and went down before them. Morgan rolled over the line. A kick failed. Half-time came, Hazelton came on, and said a lot of things to him, which he answered unconsciously.

  A whistle blew. Once more the magenta jerseys swept everything before them. There seemed no white jerseys at all. Numberless times he watched Lovelace taking the place kick. He thought he heard Mansell shrieking: “Heave it into them! Well done! Now you’ve got them!” Once he had a sensation of kicking the ball past the halves; he seemed clear, the full-back rushed up and fell in front of him, the ball stopped for a second, then rolled on. He heard someone coming up behind him; the line grew dimly white under his feet; he fell on the ball; there was a roar of cheering. The whistle went in short, sharp blasts. The game was over.

  And then he realised that the House had won, that his hopes were satisfied, that the Buller crowd had been routed, that the cup would shimmer on the mantelpiece. A wave of wild exultation came over him. The House poured over the touch-line, yelling and shouting. It was all “a wonder and a wild desire.”

  Then came the glorious reaction, “the bright glory of after battle wine.” The tea in the tuck-shop. They were out of training. Then the perfect laziness of lying full-length in his hammock, talking of the splendid victory. Then came the House tea. It was much like the Roman triumph. The whole House sat in their places ten minutes before six. Tablecloths were removed; everyone took down heavy books, boots, sticks. Then when the Abbey struck six, Lovelace led the side into hall, up to the dais, to the Sixth Form table. Everyone shouted, roared, beat the tables. Dust arose. It was very hard to breathe. The Chief came and made a speech. There was more shouting, more shrieking, more beating of tables.

  At last hall came with its gift of real rest. Gordon lay in the hammock, Lovelace reposed with his feet on the table. Everyone came in to congratulate them. Hazelton invited them in second hall to supper in the games study; the gramophone played ragtime choruses. Gordon sang all of them. Everyone was gloriously, unutterably happy.

  Meredith sent a wire: “Well done, House: now for the Two Cock.”

  In the dormitory Hazelton was talking over the match.

  “By Jove, when that side is the Three Cock, we shall win by fifty points. Lord, I do envy you, Caruthers! You will see the day, and be in at the finish. I shall only shout from the touch-line.” And he added: “My God, I shall shout, too.”

  There was nothing to mar the extreme joyousness of life. The world lay at Gordon’s feet. He had only to stoop to pick it up.

  Chap
ter V

  Dual Personality

  The Two Cock was always played a fortnight after the Thirds, and during that fortnight the outhouses had to play off among themselves three preliminary rounds. For them it was a remarkably strenuous time. The two best outhouses sides had, in fact, to play four house matches in twelve days. But it was possible for the School House to take things easily for at least half a week. And these three days out of training meant a lot to Gordon and others, who would have to play not only in the Two Cock, but most probably in the Three Cock as well. It prevented staleness; and staleness was the great danger that all outhouse sides had to face.

  The week after the Thirds was regarded as a fairly slack time before the strenuous week that culminated in the Two Cock. There would probably be only one game—on the Saturday; and that a short quarter-of-an-hour-each-way affair. It was usually a quite uneventful time. This term, however, an occurrence took place that had a big effect on the growth of Gordon’s character.

  Finnemore had caught influenza; the Chief had to go for a week to Oxford. The Sixth was at a loose end. Various masters took it in various subjects, or at least were supposed to. Most of the week was spent in the studies, as the master in charge forgot to turn up.

  One afternoon, Ferrers was to take them in English. But Ferrers was engaged in writing an article on the “New Public School Boy” for The Cornhill Magazine, and wanted to be quiet. He sent the form to their studies to write an essay on a typical Ferrers subject: “Poetry is in the first instance the outpouring of a rebel.” It had to be shown up by six o’clock.

  Gordon revelled in it. During the long afternoon he poured out his fierce soul. His life was now a strange paradox. Half the time he thought of poetry, worshipping any sort of rebellion against the conventional standards of living. At other times he was like the ordinary Philistine, blindly worshipping games, never seeing that they led nowhere, and were as a blind alley. This afternoon Gordon forgot everything but Swinburne, Byron, Rossetti, and the poets of revolt. He stigmatised Wordsworth as a doddering old man, not knowing that his return to nature was the greatest revolution in English literature. In a text-book he saw Shelley described as a rebel. He got a copy of his works out of the library, but found little there resembling the work of his own favourite. However, he quoted a verse out of O World, O Life, O Time! and decided to search more deeply later on. The bulk of the essay was a glowing eulogy of The Hymn to Proserpine and Don Juan. It was very dogmatic, very absurd in parts, but it had the merit of enthusiasm, and, at any rate, showed a genuine appreciation of a certain class of literature.

  Well satisfied, he made his way across to the Sixth Form room, and found Ferrers gazing at a pile of papers, as Hercules must have gazed at the Augean stables.

  “Um,” said Ferrers, “who are you?”

  “Caruthers, sir. I have brought you the essay you set the Sixth.”

  “Right; let’s have a look at it; hope it is better than the stuff I have just been reading.”

  “Yes, yes, um—ah,” he murmured to himself, as he read on. There was clearly some hankering after style, some searching for an idea. Ferrers dearly wanted to smile at the attack on Wordsworth, and the comparison between Swinburne and Milton (whom Gordon had never read), all in favour of the Pre-Raphaelite. But he knew that it would be a fatal thing to do; it would seem superior; the master must come down to the boy’s level. He read on to the end of the wild, sprawling peroration.

  “Not bad stuff, Caruthers, not bad at all. Far and away better than anything I have so far struck. I must talk to you again about this; I am glad you love Byron; I do myself; people run him down—fools, that is. You stick to Byron, he is all right. And don’t despise the rest too much. Have a shot at Keats and Shelley. They are not so powerful, but good all the same, very fine stuff . . . Try The Pot of Basil. Must rush off now. Are you in training? No! Not yet. Right. Come up to tea tomorrow. Goodnight.”

  And thus began a friendship that was the most permanent in Gordon’s school career.

  Every Friday he used to climb up the hill past Rogers’s house, and step out down the white London road to Ferrers’s cosy little home. Over a cup of tea he read an essay. Ferrers would lie back listening, and then discuss it with him. He sometimes blamed the actual expression of it, but he never found fault on questions of taste. He let Gordon browse at will in the fields of English literature; he suggested books he thought Gordon would like; he did not try to rush him on. There was heaps of time; he would let Gordon develop on his own lines.

  From these evenings Gordon derived a pleasure that he found it hard to explain. He was thankful to get away from the footer talk, the inevitable intrigues, scandals, all in fact that went to form the daily curriculum. The world of ideas was far more attractive. Ferrers, although himself a quarter-mile Blue, looked upon games as a recreation, and upon school life as a mud-heap that had to be washed clean. Poetry, drama, the modern novel, these were what Ferrers loved; and Gordon was glad to find someone who thought like this. He felt uplifted after his talks with Ferrers, he walked back to the House buoyant, as it were on wings. Then as the school gates rose before him, and he heard the sound of a football bouncing in the court, the old routine caught him once more. He plunged into the old life with the same zest. He devised a new scheme for avoiding work, thought out an idea for teaching forwards to heel, laughed, discussed athletics and was well content. He tried to analyse his feelings, but could not. He was now two separate persons. At times he was the dreamer, the lover of art and poetry; at another the politician, the fighter who lived every minute of his life deeply to the full, with one fixed aim before him. Gordon wondered if this apparent paradox in himself was in any way an answer of the enigma that an artist’s life so frequently was utterly different from the broad outlines of his work. Browning had talked of a man having “two soul-sides.” Had he two soul-sides, one for the world, the other for art—and Ferrers? But then Browning had spoken contemptuously of the “one to face the world with.” Surely games were as good as poetry? Or weren’t they, after all? He felt an unanswerable doubt, and at such times of introspection he would stop trying to think and merely let himself be carried on in whatever course fortune chose to bear him. And so the Jekyll and Hyde business went on.

  Chapter VI

  The Games Committee

  In the mud and the rain the School House Two Cock team, coming up early from a puntabout, joined the crowd watching the last stages of the Buller’s v. Claremont’s house match, and cheered Claremont’s to the echo. It was a remarkably fine game. When “no side” was called, the score was nine all. Extra time was played, and just before the close, amid great enthusiasm, a limping Claremont’s forward fell over the line from the line out. None shouted louder than the School House contingent. Everyone had grown tired of the Buller’s domination. They had been successful too long. For two years they had not lost a single house match. The Thirds had been their first reverse; but even then they had triumphed over all their outhouse opponents. This was the first occasion, since Gordon had been at Fernhurst, that the Buller’s colours had been lowered by an outhouse side. It signified the breaking up of their rule. Gordon shouted like the Vengeance following the tumbrils. He roared loudly under “the Bull’s” nose, stamped off the field to tea, without a thought of the effect that his demonstration might have had upon “the Bull” himself.

  As it happened, to “the Bull” the incident meant a lot.

  “What is the reason of it?” he said to Felston that evening. “How have I made these School House men, and especially Caruthers, hate me? They seem to delight in the defeat of my house. Of course, I can understand their wanting their house to beat mine, but why should they worry so much about Claremont’s doing so? I can’t understand it; and Caruthers will be leading the school scrum in two years. We must not have bad feeling between the houses. Honest rivalry is all right; but there seems so much spite about it all nowadays. It was not so when I was a boy, and it wasn’t so three years ago. I don�
�t understand.”

  A climax was reached in the Two Cock, a match rendered famous in Fernhurst history by the amazing refereeing of a new master named Princeford, who had come as a stop-gap for one term. The match was played in the mud and slush, and was entirely devoid of incident. The play rolled from one end of the ground to the other. Archie performed prodigies of valour; Gordon did some brilliant things; Collins was quite fierce; but good football was impossible under the circumstances. Early in the first half, amid tremendous cheering, Lovelace scored a fine try, by the touch-line. There was no doubt about it. The school lined up behind the posts. But Princeford would have none of it He came up, fussing and important:

  “No try, there. Knock on. Scrum!”

  A gasp went up from both sides. Was the man blind?

  “What is the fool talking about?” thundered Gordon.

  Princeford was round in a second: “Who said that?”

  Gordon stepped forward.

  “Ah, I shall remember you.”

  The game continued; the outhouses amazed at such luck; the School House sullen and indignant. The play developed into a series of forward rushes resulting in nothing. It was an amazingly dull game to watch. From one of these rushes Gordon got clear; the full-back fell on the ball, Gordon took a huge kick at the ball. One had to kick hard on such a sticky ground. He missed the ball, and caught the back on the side of the head.

  “Oh, damned sorry,” he said.

  It was quite unintentional, as would have been obvious to anyone who knew anything about the game. No one would be fool enough to kick the man, when by kicking the ball he might score a try. But Princeford was on Gordon like a shot. He began to lecture him before all the masters on unsportsmanlike play, and threatened to send him off the field. Gordon glowered at him. It was a combat of temperaments. The game resulted in a draw. No try was scored. It was a dull performance, occasionally relieved by individual brilliance. Everyone was disappointed.