Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 15

Table of Contents

And thus we were taught and fitted to be rulers of men.

As the London train steamed away from Melton Station, Loring leant out of the carriage window for a last sight of the school buildings clustering white in the July sunshine on the crest of the hill. Secretly I believe we were both feeling what a strange place Melton would be without us.

"Six years, old son!" he observed, drawing his head in. "Dam' good years they were, too. Wonder how long it'll be before you Radicals abolish places like this."

"There are lots of other things I'd abolish first," I said. It was a mental convention with Loring to regard me as a jaundiced, fanatical Marat, and with the argumentativeness of youth I played up to his lead.

"What good has Melton done?" he challenged.

At one time my faith in public schools was such that I generously pitied anyone who had struggled to manhood in outer darkness. Infirmity of judgement or approaching middle age make it daily harder for me to divide the institutions of the world into the Absolutely Good or the Utterly Bad. It is probably wise to raise up a class of men who shall be educated and not technically instructed—wide horizons and an infinite capacity for learning constitute an aim sufficiently exalted. That was the aim of Melton, and we were well educated within narrow limits that excluded modern history, economics, English literature, science and modern languages. We never strove to be practical and had a pathetic belief in the validity of pure scholarship as an equipment for life.

I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy, subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is adequate—conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her public schools.

The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of co-ordination and discipline—as other nations may perhaps learn those same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought up to the public-school standard of conduct.

No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class, will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness and its pragmatical efficiency. I never 'sneaked' though the price of silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor, though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff, though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other, and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the challenge.

There is no Radicalism in schools—I had no business to use the word. After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles, "but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and so on."

In moments of uncritical pride I judge the tree by its fruit. It is the public school men, grumbling at their work, who—shall we say?—govern the Indian Empire, with resentment of praise from others and no thoughts of praising themselves. Versatile, light-hearted and infinitely resourceful if cholera sweep the land, they will step from one dead man's shoes to another's and leave a village to govern a province. Haggard and drawn with long weeks of eighteen-hour days, they will yet find time to mistrust the man who is not of their race or speech or school and growl at him who offends by his clothes or enthusiasm or aspirates. And the Indian Empire goes afresh to perdition with every new fall in the rupee or change in the colour of the Government minute paper. In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his fellows will come out on strike.

"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.

In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. At eighteen everything seemed so easy: the world was blind but not selfish—except for the high and dry Tories who were to be quietly put out of the way if they proved obdurate; everyone else would yield to reason—and my eloquence.

The favourite vision was a crowded meeting swayed to laughter or tears or passion by my words—a memory of Mr. Gladstone's last public speech on the Armenian atrocities. At other times when my Irish fluency had been too rudely interrupted, I pictured myself as heir to Parnell's heritage of masterful silence. Cold, inflexible, contemptuous—I had seen him in Dublin when I was a boy of seven, and externals counted for so much that will-power seemed a matter of compressed lips and folded arms. I was but eighteen, and my Radicalism a matter of inheritance rather than conviction. It took years of painful disillusionment to discover how much fanaticism is required to shake the resolution of others; and years more to find how completely I was lacking in it. One morning, when I had attempted to catch the Speaker's eye some fourteen times in the course of an all-night sitting, I walked out of the House and spent the day asleep in a Turkish bath; on waking I recalled Burgess's words, "Not for thee the dust of the arena, laddie." The superman vision was at last dispelled.

"Well, I had a dam' good time there," I said to Loring, by way of closing the Melton debate.

In common with many others Loring drew pleadings against Radicalism which would have delighted a lawyer. To begin with, there were no such people as Radicals—he at any rate had never met them. The professed Radicals of his acquaintance were a handful of mere agitators, misleading a too credulous electorate that was not yet fit to exercise the franchise; morally the Radical party was negligible because its sole ambition was, by sheer force of numbers, to take away anything anybody had got—he for one would never acquiesce in confiscation merely because a majority voted it. Then in our arguments I would confront him with the Will of the People—for some strange reason only capable of interpretation by Radicals. The phrase had a curious hypnotic effect on us both, for he would invariably retaliate with the statement that the sole custodians of the People's Will were to be found in the House of Lords. And infallibly we would both lose our tempers over the first Home Rule Bill.

"At heart you're quite sound," he was good enough to say on this occasion.

On reaching London we drove to Loring House, where I spent the night before crossing to Ireland. A month later we met for Horse Show week. Loring stayed with me, and we went to Dublin together to join the Hunter-Oakleighs, who were cousins of mine and at this time head of the Catholic branch of the family. Half-way through September I put in a week at House of Steynes, and was not surprised to find that Loring had included my cousin Violet in the party. In the first week of October we returned to London, picked up Draycott, who had spent a stifling summer, loose-tied and low-collared, in the Quarter Latin, and descended upon Oxford to order the decoration of our rooms.

Draycott had been banished to Old Library, to his present disgust and subsequent reconciliation, and allotted a gloomy first-floor set which for the next three years was the scene of "Planchette" séances and roulette parties. Loring and I had been given one of the coveted double suites in Tom, and for the length of an afternoon we condemned furniture and carpets, issued orders to a deferential, tired upholsterer, and finally emerged into the autumn sunlight of the Quad with a feeling of modest triumph that there would be few rooms in Oxford to compare with ours.

On the following Friday we made our first informal appearance.

Writing after sixteen years that have been neither unvaried nor uneventful, I find that Oxford lingers in my memory as an adventure never before experienced even in my first days at Melton, never afterwards repeated even when I lived first in London, or fought my Wiltshire elections, or entered the House. I like to fill a fresh pipe and lean back in my chair, conjuring up a thousand little personal scenes—of no importance in the world to anyone but myself: my first Sunday luncheon, when I was the guest of Jerry Westermark, and if the rest of the company were third-year men like him, entitled to an arm-chair by the fire in Junior Common Room. The first luncheon I myself gave half-way through the term, my anxiety not to leave out even one of my new friends, and my anger with Crabtree of Magdalen who invited himself at the last moment and filled me with eleventh-hour fears that the food would run short. My first "Grind," where I pocketed ten pounds by backing Loring, who won the race at the price of a broken collar-bone. My first Commem. when I lost my heart to Amy Loring. My first appearance in the schools and my confounding ad hoc knowledge of St. Paul's journey. My first....

It is always the first impression that seems to endure longest, but there were friendships I made and lost wherein I can fix no date. Tom Dainton, over the way at Oriel, dropped out of my circle some time or other; we nodded on meeting at the Club, and each would invite the other's assistance in entertaining his relations, but a day came when I felt unworthy of Tom's earnest and muscular Blues. And I have no doubt he shook a puzzled head over the "footlers" with whom I had cast in my lot. Equally there came a day when I found myself using a man's Christian name for the first time, and the last piece of ice drifted out to sea.

I like to recreate the atmosphere of eager activity, of new-won freedom and approaching maturity. Six years at Melton had been a time of bells and chapels, first schools and roll-calls, compulsory games and "Lights Out"; at Oxford I was a man, with liberty in moderation to cut lectures and private hours, go to bed when I liked, organize a banquet and participate from time to time in wholesale destruction of property, no man saying me nay. The differences were great enough to mask the resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new House Standard with more than Meltonian observance of taboo rules and caste distinctions. We wore no College colours, we dressed for the theatre, and the "Rowing Push" were at pains not to know the "Footlers" who beagled or hunted. But we were all unconscious and in deadly earnest, whether we testified to our abhorrence to Balliol, or walked up Headington Hill and back by Mesopotamia discussing the abolition of private property or lounged in chairs round a piled-up fire talking and smoking—and, for variety, smoking and talking.

Not unless I die and be born again shall I a second time know the joy of living in a city of three thousand men, all of them my soul's friends—save such as came from other colleges or the despised quarters of my own.

"Oakum, come and talk to me!"

I can still hear the voice echoing through the morning silence of Peck, still see a foreshortened face, chin on hands, and white teeth gripping a straight-grained pipe.

"Hallo, Geoffrey! D'you think I could get one of your windows?"

"Better not try!"

There is a pause in the dialogue while I kick up a handful of small stones and leap nimbly away from the siphon which Geoffrey Hale has just stolen from Rawbones, his neighbor across the landing, and shattered in a thousand pieces not three feet from where I stand. A stone rises.

"Poor shooting!" from Geoffrey.

My next aim is better, and there is the sharp musical note of broken glass. Thirty heads projecting over thirty flower-boxes chant in chorus, "Porter-r-r! Mr. Oakleigh!" while I abandon dignity and hasten to the nearest staircase, to the end that one broken window may be distributed throughout the College and charged to "General Damage Account." Rawbones will bear the undivided charges of his siphon.

In the early months of the war I had occasion to spend a few hours in Oxford. The colleges were filled with soldiers and the Schools had been turned into a hospital, while Belgian refugees looked unfamiliarly down from the choicest rooms in St. Aldates or the High. It was the Oxford of a nightmare, but, though I saw no more than a dozen undergraduates throughout the city, there was hardly college or shop or house that did not hold the spirit of a man I had known. Ghostly, muffled rowing men still ran through the Meadows in the gathering dusk of a winter afternoon; ghostly scholars on bicycles, with tattered gowns wrapped round their necks and square notebooks clutched precariously under their arms, shot tinkling under the very wheels of the sempiternal horse-trams; ghostly hunting men, mud-splashed and weary, cracked conscientious whips in the middle of the Quad. At six-and-thirty the elasticity and abandon are gone, but I would give much to shout one more conversation from one drawing-room window to another, to spend an hour pouring hot sealing-wax into the keyhole of a neighbor's oak, to deck a life-size Apollo Belvedere in cap and gown and deposit him in Draycott's bed. The power and daring have left me, but I thank Heaven that the wish remains.

On the first day Loring and I advanced silently and with sudden shyness through Tom Gate. The knots of men in lodge or street were embarrassingly preoccupied and indifferent to us. Never had I imagined that the great personalities of a public school could count for so little. "The Earl of Chepstow; Mr. G. Oakleigh," picked out in white on a black ground, reminded us reassuringly that we too had a stake in the College, but for an hour we were well content to arrange our books and experiment with the ordering of our furniture, deliberately shrinking from an appearance in public until the time came for us to present ourselves to the Dean. In Hall, and on our way to be admitted by the Vice-Chancellor, we fell in with other Meltonians and offered the effusive friendship of loneliness to men perhaps previously ignored. Here and there I met someone I had not seen since private-school days. Once the alliance was formed under stress of agglomeration, we spent the remainder of the afternoon in a serried mass inspecting each other's rooms, ordering wine, tobacco and bedroom ware in the town and at tea-time valorously venturing into the Junior Common Room.

Within the next two days Loring and I received a number of cards, unceremoniously doled out by a messenger in short-sighted communion with a manuscript list of all freshmen worth knowing, as compiled by an informal committee of second and third year men. A number of Athletic Secretaries wrung from us promises of conditional allegiance which we were too timorous to withhold, and our respective tutors propounded what lectures and private hours we were to attend. Within a week we had returned many of the calls, ceremoniously and in person, returning a second and third time if our host were not at home; breakfast invitations began to be bandied about, and the Clubs in search of new members examined our eligibility.

As the one Liberal in a room full of silent Imperialists who consumed surprising quantities of dessert and paid no attention to the debate beyond applauding perfunctorily at the end of each oration, I remember impassionately haranguing the "Twenty Club" on the unreasonableness of Chamberlain's attitude towards President Kruger. At the "Mermaids," where the consumption of food and drink was even greater, I read the part of "Charles Surface"; nay, more, in a burst of enthusiasm I perpetrated a paper on "Irish Music" for the Essay Club, in those days a despised and persecuted church not infrequently screwed up in the catacombs of Meadow Buildings and left to support life on coffee, walnut cake, pure reason and some astonishingly rich Lowland dialects. Liberalism burned flickeringly in the autumn of '99, and the University Liberal clubs contended with flattering rivalry for my unresisting and largely uninterested body.

The term was still young when Loring was elected a members of the Loders, and soon afterwards he joined the Bullingdon. As he now dined at the Club table in Hall, I gathered Draycott and Mowbray, a Wykehamist named Finck-Boynton and two Etonians, Bertie Grainger and Mark Seton, and founded a mess next to the Guest Table, whence we could throw bread at almost any friend in Hall. There we sat and criticized the kitchen, the High Table and our neighbors, decided a hundred knotty points of conduct and elaborated a pose which should mark us out as men of originality, fearlessness and distinction without any of the distressing immaturity of mind betrayed by our fellow-freshmen.

In looking back on the early days I find something very ingenuous and engaging in our delusion of originality. Whether we ragged the rooms of the meek, hysterical Ainsworth (who was alleged to hold private prayer-meetings and intercede by name for the souls of lost undergraduates), whether we serenaded Greatorex, the mathematical tutor, on the night he had a Colonial Bishop staying with him, whether we established an informal breakfast club at the Clarendon because we could get no hot food in College on Sundays, we were soberly and seriously convinced that earlier generations had never thought of doing such things before. For three years I watched with mild exasperation three successive drafts of amazingly juvenile men clumsily aping the achievements of us, their seniors.

New prejudices grew to a rank birth, but one or two old convictions came to be shaken. I no longer looked on Eton as a forcing-house of ineffective snobbery, nor on Winchester as the home of well-bred, uniform inertia; I ceased to say that while one Carthusian was occasionally tolerable, more than one would dominate and scatter the most varied society; gradually I found that something might be said even for men who had never been to a public school. Loring shook his head in puzzled and not entirely affected disapproval of my social adventures and, though punctiliously courteous to my guests, would not infrequently condemn them categorically as "stumers" when they were gone.

Yet on reflection I learned more of men and books from a reserved and aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch graduates than from many a more decorative sect in the first-floor rooms of Canterbury. McBain, a threadbare Aberdonian, would drift in on a Sunday night, when Loring was away dining with the Loders, and we would sit till the small hours talking of Renan and a non-miraculous Christianity. Frazar, who was taking the Modern Language School, would lie back sipping whisky and filling the grate with half-smoked cigarettes as he talked of life at the Sorbonne and the wonderful appreciation of modern French poetry that he would one day publish. Carmichael, an embittered, one-idea revolutionary, would throw Marx at my head and give fierce descriptions of his Board-school struggles before a scholarship set him free to peddle his brains in the market on equal terms with his fellows. At Melton we seemed all drawn from one class, brought up in the same channels of thought, given the same books to read.

When educational reformers fill "The Times" with their screeds, I am tempted to wonder whether it much matters what a man be taught so long as he meet enough men who have been taught something else. I worked hard at Oxford and did tolerably well in the Schools: perhaps they taught me how to learn, but the gaps in my knowledge when I came down make me look on the curriculum as "a chaos upheld by Providence." And then I think of three thousand men from a hundred schools and a thousand homes, flung behind the enchanted, crumbling walls to bring their theories, ethics, enthusiasms and limitations into the common stock; and at such times I wonder what better schooling a Royal Commission could secure for the plastic imagination of nineteen.

For all our poses Oxford gave us a taste of that world in which most of us were to pass our lives—an obsolete, artificial, inadequate world if you will, but the one wherein we had to find social and administrative salvation. We felt the heavy democratic control of public opinion when the notoriety-hunting Glynne was ducked in Mercury for giving luncheons in his rooms to the too-well-known Gracie (I never discovered her surname) from the florists in the Broad; we saw something of the ideal Equality of Opportunity when Carmichael went from a scholarship to a fellowship and then to a provincial Professorship of Economics and ultimately to an exalted position in, I think, the Board of Education; by the College cliques and fashions, the social mistrust and jealousies, the canons and taboos, we were in some sort forearmed against the absurdities, the unworthiness and irreconcilabilities that awaited us outside Oxford.

A fruitful lesson of my first term was furnished by the Duke of Flint. He was a freshman, an Etonian, a "Gourmet" and a member of the Bullingdon. Any week in which he was drunk less than five times was no ordinary week; any story that could be repeated in decent company was not from his hiccoughing lips. Without question the most unmitigated degenerate I have ever met, the sole excuse to be made for him was that by inheritance his blood was sufficiently tainted to infect a dozen generations. Yet I cannot think it was in a spirit of commiseration that Oxford took the little ruffian to its bosom, inviting him to its luncheons and electing him to its clubs; there was something at once shamefaced and defiant in the way his friends proclaimed—without challenge—that he was "not at all a bad fellow, really; rather fun, in fact." From the night when he staggered down the High in the purple dress coat of the "Gourmets," breaking the shop windows with his bare hand and I bound him up and put him to bed, to the day not many weeks ago when he died of general paralysis, I watched his social career with interest.

We none of us had much time for introspection in those eager, early days. I was swearing rapid friendships, eating aldermanic banquets and conscientiously flitting from one to another of my new clubs with the zeal of a neophyte and the greed of a man who knows that after the dull, inadequate dinner of Hall an unlimited dessert awaits him. Loring and I had refused to compete for the Melton close scholarships, as the money was not essential to us, and we could now idle for a twelvemonth over Pass Mods. and leave three serious years for our final schools. A minimum of lectures satisfied our tutors, and the rest of the time we could argue and read and smoke eternally new and expensive mixtures, which we backed against all comers and changed perhaps thrice in a term.