point after a brief rally with Peter. “Game,” said Joan.
Troop declared he did not care to play again. It would put him off
tennis. “Take me as a partner,” said Joan. “No—I don’t think so,
thanks,” said Troop coldly.
Every one became thoughtful and drifted towards the net. Oswald
approached from the pergola, considering the problem.
“I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for years,” he remarked,
strolling towards them.
“Well, sir, aren’t you with me?” asked Troop.
“No. I’m for Joan—and Peter.”
“But that sort of trick play——”
“No. The way to play a game is to get all over the game and to be equal
to anything in it. If there is a stroke or anything that spoils the game
it ought to be barred by the rules. Apart from that, a game ought to be
worked out to its last possibility. Things oughtn’t to be barred in the
interests of a few conventional swipes. This cutting down of a game to
just a few types of stroke——”
Peter looked apprehensive.
“It’s laziness,” said Oswald.
Troop was too puzzled to be offended. “But you have to work tremendously
hard, sir, at the proper game.”
“Not mentally,” said Oswald. “There’s too much good form in all our
games. It’s just a way of cutting down a game to a formality.”
“But, for instance, sir, would you bowl grounders at cricket?”
“If I thought the batsman had been too lazy to learn what to do with
them. Why not?”
“If you look at it like _that_, sir!” said Troop and had no more to say.
But he went away marvelling. Oswald was a V.C. Yet he looked at games
like—like an American, he played to win; it was enough to perplex any
one....
“Must confess I don’t see it,” said Troop when Oswald had gone....
When at last Troop and Wilmington departed Oswald went with them to the
station—the luggage was sent on in the cart—and walked back over the
ploughed ridge and up the lane with Peter. For a time they kept silence,
but Troop was in both their minds.
“He’s a good sort,” said Peter.
“Admirable—in some ways.”
“I thought,” said Peter, “you didn’t like him. You kept on pulling his
leg.”
So Peter had seen.
“Well, he doesn’t exercise his brain very much,” said Oswald.
“Stops short at his neck,” said Peter. “Exercise, I mean.”
“You and Troop are singularly unlike each other,” said Oswald.
“Oh, that’s exactly it. I can’t make out why I like him. If nothing else
attracted me, that would.”
“Does he know why he likes you?”
“Hasn’t the ghost of an idea. It worries him at times. Makes him want to
try and get all over me.”
“Does he—at all?”
“Lots,” said Peter. “I fag at the blessed Cadet Corps simply because I
like him. At rugger he’s rather a god, you know. And he’s a clean chap.”
“He’s clean.”
“Oh, he’s clean. It’s catching,” said Peter, and seemed to reflect. “And
in a sort of way lately old Troop’s taken to swatting. It’s pathetic.”
Then with a shade of anxiety, “I don’t think for a moment he twigged you
were pulling his leg.”
Oswald came to the thing that was really troubling him. “Allowing for
his class,” said Oswald, “that young man is growing up to an outlook
upon the world about as broad and high as the outlook of a bricklayer’s
labourer.”
Peter reflected impartially, and Oswald noted incidentally what a good
profile the boy was developing.
“A Clean, Serious bricklayer’s labourer,” said Peter, weighing his
adjectives carefully.
“But he may go into Parliament, or have to handle a big business,” said
Oswald.
“Army for Troop,” said Peter, “via a university commission.”
“Even armies have to be handled intelligently nowadays,” said Oswald.
“He’ll go into the cavalry,” said Peter, making one of those tremendous
jumps in thought that were characteristic of himself and Joan.
§ 12
A day or so after Troop’s departure Peter waylaid Oswald in the garden.
Peter, now that Troop had gone, was amusing himself with dissection
again—an interest that Troop had disposed of as a “bit morbid.” Oswald
thought the work Peter did neat and good; he had to brush up his own
rather faded memories of Huxley’s laboratory in order to keep pace with
the boy.
“I wish you’d come to the Glory Hole and look at an old rat I dissected
yesterday. I want to get its solar plexus and I’m not sure about it.
I’ve been using acetic acid to bring out the nerves, but there’s such a
lot of white stuff about....”
The dissection was a good piece of work, the stomach cleaned out and the
viscera neatly displayed. Very much in evidence were eight small embryo
rats which the specimen under examination, had not science overtaken
her, would presently have added to the rat population of the world.
“The old girl’s been going it,” said Peter in a casual tone, and turned
these things over with the handle of his scalpel. “Now is all _this_
stuff solar plexus, Nobby?”...
The next morning Oswald stopped short in the middle of his shaving,
which in his case involved the most tortuous deflections and grimacings.
“It’s all right with the boy,” he said to himself.
“I _think_ it’s all right.
“No nonsense about it anyhow.
“But what a tortuous, untraceable business the coming of knowledge is!
Curiosity. A fad for dissecting. An instinct for cleanliness. Pride. A
bigger boy like Troop.... Suppose Troop had been a different sort of
boy?...
“But then I suppose Peter and he wouldn’t have hit it off together.”
Oswald scraped, and presently his mind tried over a phrase.
“Inherent powers of selection,” said Oswald. “Inherent.... I suppose I
picked my way through a pretty queer lot of stuff....”
He stood wiping his safety-razor blade.
“There was more mystery in my time and more emotion. This is better....
“Facts are clean,” said Oswald, uttering the essential faith with which
science has faced vice and priestcraft, magic and muddle and fear and
mystery, the whole world over.
“Facts are clean.”
§ 13
Joan followed a year after Peter to Cambridge. She entered at Newton
Hall. Both Oswald and Aunt Phyllis preferred Newnham to Girton because
of the greater freedom of the former college. They agreed that, as
Oswald put it, if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well
be let right out.
Coming from Highmorton to Newnham was like emerging from some narrow,
draughty passage in which one marches muddily with a whispering,
giggling hockey team all very much of a sort, into a busy and confused
market-place, a rather squabbling and very exciting market-place, in
which there is the greatest variety of sorts. And Joan’s mind, too, was
opening out in an even greater measure. A year or so ago she was a
spirited, intelligent animal, a being of dreams and unaccountable
impulses; in a year or so’s time she was to become a shaped and ordered
mind, making plans, controlling every urgency, holding herself in
relation to a definite conception of herself and the world. We have
still to gauge the almost immeasurable receptivity of those three or
four crucial years. We have still to grasp what the due use of those
years may mean for mankind.
Oswald had been at great pains to find out what was the best education
the Empire provided for these two wards of his. But his researches had
brought him to realize chiefly how poor and spiritless a thing was the
very best formal education that the Empire could offer. It seemed to
him, in the bitter urgency of his imperial passion, perhaps even poorer
than it was. There was a smattering of Latin, a thinner smattering of
Greek, a little patch of Mediterranean history and literature detached
from past and future—all university history seemed to Oswald to be in
disconnected fragments—but then he would have considered any history
fragmentary that did not begin with the geological record and end with a
clear tracing of every traceable consequence of the “period” in current
affairs; there were mathematical specializations that did not so much
broaden the mind as take it into a gully, modern and mediaeval language
specializations, philosophical studies that were really not
philosophical studies at all but partial examinations of remote and
irrelevant systems, the study of a scrap of Plato or Aristotle here, or
an excursion (by means of translations) into the Hegelian phraseology
there. This sort of thing given out to a few thousand young men, for the
most part greatly preoccupied with games, and to a few hundred young
women, was all that Oswald could discover by way of mental binding for
the entire empire. It seemed to him like innervating a body as big as
the world with a brain as big as a pin’s head. As Joan and Peter grew
out of school and went up to Cambridge they became more and more aware
of a note of lamentation and woe in the voice of their guardian. He
talked at them, over their heads at lunch and dinner, to this or that
visitor. He also talked to them. But he had a great dread of
preachments. They were aware of his general discontent with the
education he was giving them, but as yet they had no standards by which
to judge his charges. Over their heads his voice argued that the
universities would give them no access worth considering to the thoughts
and facts of India, Russia, or China, that they were ignoring something
stupendous called America, that their political and economic science
still neglected the fact that every problem in politics, every problem
in the organization of production and social co-operation is a
psychological problem; and that all these interests were supremely
urgent interests, and how the devil was one going to get these things
in? But one thing Joan and Peter did grasp from these spluttering
dissertations that flew round and about them. They had to find out all
the most important things in life for themselves.
Perhaps the problem of making the teacher of youth an inspiring figure
is an insoluble one. At any rate, there was no great stir evoked in Joan
and Peter by the personalities of any of their university tutors,
lecturers, and professors. These seemed to be for the most part
little-spirited, gossiping men. They had also an effect of being
underpaid; they had been caught early by the machinery of prize and
scholarship, bred, “in the menagerie”; they were men who knew nothing of
the world outside, nothing of effort and adventure, nothing of sin and
repentance. Not that there were not whispers and scandals about, but
such sins as the dons knew of were rather in the nature of dirty
affectations, got out of Petronius and Suetonius and practised with a
tremendous sense of devilment behind locked doors, than those graver and
larger sins that really distress and mar mankind. As Joan and Peter
encountered these master minds, they appeared as gowned and capped
individuals, hurrying to lecture-rooms, delivering lectures that were
often hasty and indistinct, making obscure but caustic allusions to
rival teachers, parrying the troublesome inquiring student with an
accustomed and often quite pretty wit. With a lesser subtlety and a
greater earnestness the women dons had fallen in with this tradition.
There were occasional shy personal contacts. But at his tea or breakfast
the don was usually too anxious to impress Peter with the idea that he
himself was really only a sort of overgrown undergraduate, to produce
any other effect at all.
Into the Cambridge lecture rooms and laboratories went Joan and Peter,
notebook in hand, and back to digestion in their studies, and presently
they went into examination rooms where they vindicated their claim to
have attended to textbook and lecture. In addition Peter did some
remarkably good sketches of tutors and professors and fellow students.
This was their “grind,” Joan and Peter considered, a drill they had to
go through; it became them to pass these tests creditably—if only to
play the game towards old Nobby. Only with Peter’s specialization in
biology did he begin to find any actuality in these processes. He found
a charm in phylogenetic speculations; and above the narrow cañons of
formal “research” there were fascinating uplands of wisdom. Upon those
uplands there lay a light in which even political and moral riddles took
on a less insoluble aspect. But going out upon those uplands was
straying from the proper work.... Joan got even less from her moral
philosophy. Her principal teacher was a man shaped like a bubble, whose
life and thought was all the blowing of a bubble. He claimed to have
_proved_ human immortality. It was, he said, a very long and severe
logical process. About desire, about art, about social association,
about love, about God—for he knew also that there was no God—it mattered
not what deep question assailed him, this gifted being would dip into
his Hegelian suds and blow without apparent effort, and there you
were—as wise as when you started! And off the good man would float,
infinitely self-satisfied and manifestly absurd.
But even Peter’s biology was only incidentally helpful in answering the
fierce questions that life was now thrusting upon him and Joan. Nor had
this education linked them up to any great human solidarity. It was like
being guided into a forest—and lost there—by queer, absent-minded men.
They had no sense of others being there too, upon a common adventure....
“And it is all that I can get for them!” said Oswald. “Bad as it is, it
is the best thing there is.”
He tried to find comfort in comparisons.
“Has any country in the world got anything much better?”
§ 14
One day Oswald found himself outside Cambridge on the Huntingdon road.
It was when he had settled that Peter was to enter Trinity, and while he
was hesitating between Newnham and Girton as Joan’s destiny. There was a
little difficulty in discovering Girton. Unlike Newnham, which sits down
brazenly in Cambridge, Girton is but half-heartedly at Cambridge, coyly
a good mile from the fountains of knowledge, hiding its blushes between
tall trees. He was reminded absurdly of a shy, nice girl sitting afar
off until father should come out of the public-house....
He fell thinking about the education of women in Great Britain.
At first he had been disposed to think chiefly of Peter’s education and
to treat Joan’s as a secondary matter; but little by little, as he
watched British affairs close at hand, he had come to measure the
mischief feminine illiteracy can do in the world. In no country do the
lunch and dinner-party, the country house and personal acquaintance,
play so large a part in politics as they do in Great Britain. And the
atmosphere of all that inner world of influence is a womanmade
atmosphere, and an atmosphere made by women who are for the most part
untrained and unread. Here at Girton and Newnham, and at Oxford at
Somerville, he perceived there could not be room for a tithe of the
girls of the influential and governing classes. Where were the rest?
English womanhood was as yet only nibbling at university life. Where
were the girls of the peerage, the county-family girls and the like?
Their brothers came up, but they stayed at home and were still educated
scarcely better than his Aunt Charlotte had been educated forty years
ago—by a genteel person, by a sort of mental maid who did their minds as
their maids did their hair for the dinner-table.
“No wonder,” he said, “they poison politics and turn it all into
personal intrigues. No wonder they want religion to be just a business
of personal consolations. No wonder every sort of charlatan and spook
dealer, fortune-teller and magic healer flourishes in London. Well, Joan
anyhow shall have whatever they can give her here....
“It’s better than nothing. And she’ll talk and read....”
§ 15
But school and university are only the formal part of education. The
larger part of the education of every human being is and always has been
and must be provided by the Thing that Is. Every adult transaction has
as its most important and usually most neglected aspect its effect upon
the minds of the young. Behind school and university the Empire itself
was undesignedly addressing Joan and Peter. It was, so to speak,
gesticulating at them over their teachers’ heads and under their
teachers’ arms. It was performing ceremonies and exhibiting spectacles
of a highly suggestive nature.
In a large and imposing form certain ideas were steadfastly thrust at
Joan and Peter. More particularly was the idolization of the monarchy
thrust upon them. In terms of zeal and reverence the press, the pulpit,
and the world at large directed the innocent minds of Joan and Peter to
the monarch as if that individual were the Reason, the Highest Good and
Crown of the collective life. Nothing else in the world of Joan and
Peter got anything like the same tremendous show. Their early years were
coloured by the reflected glories of the Diamond Jubilee; followed the
funeral pomps of Queen Victoria, with much mobbing of negligent or
impecunious people not in black by the loyal London crowd; then came the
postponed and then the actual coronation of King Edward, public prayings
for his health, his stupendous funeral glories; succeeded by the
coronation of King George, and finally, about the time that Joan
followed Peter up to Cambridge, the Coronation Durbar. The multitude
which could not go to India went at least to the Scala cinema, and saw
the adoration in all its natural colours. Reverent crowds choked that
narrow bystreet. Across all the life and activities of England, across
all her intellectual and moral effort, holding up legislation,
interfering with industry, stopping the traffic, masking every reality
of the collective life, these vast formalities trailed with a
magnificent priority. Nothing was respected as they were respected!
Sober statesmen were seen invested in strange garments that no sensible
person would surely wear except for the gravest reasons; the archbishops
and bishops were discovered bent with reverence, invoking the name of
God freely, blessing the Crown with the utmost gravity, investing the
Sovereign with Robe and Orb, Ring and Sceptre, anointing him with the
Golden Coronation Spoon. Either the Crown was itself a matter of
altogether supreme importance to the land or else it was the most
stupendous foolery that ever mocked and confused the grave realities of
a great people’s affairs.
The effect of it upon the minds of our two young people
was—complicating. How complicating it is few people realize who have not
closely studied the educational process of the British mind as a whole.
Then it becomes manifest that the monarch, the state church, and the
system of titles and social precedence centering upon the throne,
constitute a system of mental entanglements against which British
education struggles at an enormous disadvantage. The monarchy in Great
Britain is a compromise that was accepted by a generation regardless of
education and devoid of any sense of the future. It is now a mask upon
the British face; it is a gaudy and antiquated and embarrassing wrapping
about the energies of the nation. Because of it Britain speaks to her
youth, as to the world, with two voices. She speaks as a democratic
republic, just ever so little crowned, and also she speaks as a
succulently loyal Teutonic monarchy. Either she is an adolescent
democracy whose voice is breaking or an old monarchy at the squeaking
stage. Now her voice is the full strong voice of a great people, now it
pipes ridiculously. She perplexes the world and stultifies herself.
That was why her education led up to no such magnificent exposition and
consolidation of purpose as Oswald dreamt of for his wards. Instead, the
track presently lost itself in a maze of prevarications and evasions.
The country was double-minded, double-mindedness had become its habit,
and it had lost the power of decision. Every effort to broaden and
modernize university education in Britain encountered insurmountable
difficulties because of this fundamental dispersal of aim. The court got
in the way, the country clergy got in the way, the ruling-class families
got in the way. It is impossible to turn a wandering, chance-made track
into a good road until you know where it is to go. And that question of
destination was one that no Englishman before the war could be induced
to put into plain language. Doublemindedness had become his second
nature. From the very outset it had taken possession of him. When a
young American goes to his teacher to ask why he should serve his state,
he is shown a flag of thirteen stripes and eight and forty stars and
told a very plain and inspiring history. His relations to his country
are thenceforward as simple and unquestionable as a child’s to its
mother. He may be patriotic or unpatriotic as a son may be dutiful or
undutiful, but he will not be muddle-headed. But when Joan and Peter
first began to realize that they belonged to the British Empire they
were shown a little old German woman and told that reverence for her
linked us in a common abjection with the millions of India. They were
told also that really this little old lady did nothing of the slightest
importance and that the country was the freest democracy on earth, ruled
by its elected representatives. And each of these preposterously
contradictory stories pursued them in an endless series of variations up
to adolescence....
To two naturally clear-headed young people it became presently as
palpably absurd to have a great union of civilized states thus
impersonated as it is to have Wall impersonated by Snout the Tinker in
_A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. They were already jeering at royalty and
the church with Aunt Phyllis long before they went up to Cambridge.
There they found plenty of associates to jeer with them. And there too
they found a quite congenial parallel stream of jeering against
Parliament, which pretended to represent the national mind and quality,
but which was elected by a method that manifestly gave no chance to any
candidate who was not nominated by a party organization. In times of
long established peace, when the tradition of generations has
established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men’s minds
are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their
political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of
life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it
is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with
a fan instead of a gun. Joan and Peter grew up to the persuasion that
the crown above them was rather a good joke, and that Parliament and its
jobs and party flummery were also a joke, and that the large, deep
rottenness in this British world about them was perhaps in the nature of
things and anyhow beyond their altering. They too were becoming
double-minded according to the tradition of the land.
Yet beneath this acquiescence in the deep-rooted political paradox of
Britain they were capable of the keenest interest in a number of
questions that they really believed were alive. It became manifest to
them that this great golden preposterous world was marred by certain
injustices and unkindnesses. Something called Labour they heard was
unhappy and complained of unfair treatment, certain grumblings came from
India and Ireland, and there was a curiously exciting subject which
demanded investigation and reforming activities called the sex question.
And generally there seemed to be, for no particular reason, a lot of
restrictions upon people’s conduct.
In addition Peter had acquired from Oswald, rather by way of example
than precept, a very definite persuasion, and Joan had acquired a
persuasion that was perhaps not quite so clearly and deeply cut, that to
make it respectable there ought to be something in one’s life in the
nature of special work. In Oswald’s case it was his African interest.
Peter thought that his own work might perhaps be biological. But that
one’s work ought to join on to the work of the people or that all the
good work in the world should make one whole was a notion that had not
apparently entered Peter’s mind. Oswald with his dread of preachments
was doubtful about any deliberate dissertations in the matter. He got
Peter to begin the _Martyrdom of Man_, which had so profoundly affected
his own life, but Peter expressed doubts about the correctness of
Reade’s Egyptian history, and put the book aside and did not go on
reading it.