heard views of life that I am sure never enter the heads of my
colleagues: when I am asked, as I frequently am, what I do in life,
they always think I am lying when I say I am a schoolmaster, and
laugh good-humouredly as if I had said something supremely funny
when I mention that Oxford was once my University: apparently all
young men claim to be "college boys": it's part of the game. Their
whole conversation is one vast lie. But it does no one any harm and
gives them a sense of romance: they get right away from the humdrum
existence of the shop-counter and the office, and for a fortnight
imagine themselves to be dukes and duchesses. But they miss half the
joy that Devon provides by not scouring the country. Their programme is
to rise late, dress with lavish care in the most glaring and tasteless
colours, and slowly promenade up and down the Front. It is all very
pretty and harmless and would delight the heart of O. Henry. They miss
entirely the thousands of joyous little creeks with which the coast is
studded: they never try to discover the secret charm of the moor. They
prefer listening to the comic songs of the coons to the birds on the
hillside, and the band on the Promenade to the rush of wind in the ears
as one stands on the cliffs.
I wish I could write a novel. But I lack every faculty necessary for
it. I can't observe properly: I can't describe the effect that scenery
has on me. I am too nervous to probe into the inner history of sad-eyed
women and dour-faced men. That they have their passionate loves and
hates, of course I know, but these every man keeps in the secret places
of the heart. Your Devonian is not the sort of man to wear his heart
upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. I came back to London two nights
ago, with my uncle, and he took me to several plays. When I am in town
I'm never satisfied unless I can put in two theatres a day. I am just
as excited at the rise of a curtain or the tuning up of the orchestra
to-day as I used to be when I was a small kid. To be able to see in
the flesh all these great actors, of whom we only hear dimly in our
fastness of Radchester, is a delight not less than, if very different
from, the sight of the red loam of Devon, or a great stag breaking from
cover with the hounds close upon his heels.
_September 26, 1911_
I spent a week with the Chichesters at Hampton and had a joyful time in
company with Tony. After leaving them I went home because my mother
suddenly developed rheumatic fever and was seriously ill. I read aloud
to her for about three hours every day from Ford Madox Hueffer's
"Ladies Whose Bright Eyes" and W. L. Courtney's "In Search of Egeria."
I have heard from the Head Master that Anstruther is to have Marshall's
house. Anstruther! Ye Gods! He is two terms junior to me. I hear that
the Begum of Bhopal wants me to coach her son in Constantinople. That
would be fun. Think of the experience! I wanted to clinch with the
offer at once, but my mother made me promise not to. Heaven knows what
it would have led to. I should have seen the world, met all the best
people, and perhaps found a good job at the end of it.
IX
_October 13, 1911_
Back again at Radchester. As usual there are a few rows on. Two of
the parson members of the staff are quarrelling because Tomson (the
High Church one) will call the Communion "Eucharist," and will talk
about the "Catholic" instead of the Protestant Church. Mathews on the
other hand calls the altar the communion-table. A battle royal is in
progress. I believe Tomson will have to go. This is a very Low Church
school and any one who crosses himself or indulges in any ritualistic
practices is looked upon as inclined to papistry.
It seems a strange thing to make such a fuss about. Both Mathews
and Tomson are good, conscientious workers, and the school will be
the poorer if either of them leaves. Another row concerns me. It is
commonly thought by some members of my form that Chichester has been
"sneaking" to me about their methods of work, a pretty laughable idea
when one thinks how little Chichester cares about any one in the
school, much less in his form. We never talk about school matters at
all. We talk books and philosophy. Anyway, I have lately been boycotted
by my form, by Montague and Haye and most of the school.
I'm reading Stevenson's and Meredith's Letters. I've got rather a
passion for letter-writers. The Paston Letters, Dorothy Osborne's, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu's, Horace Walpole's, Gray's, Lamb's and Cowper's
all gave me lasting pleasure. One feels at last as if one really was
beginning to see the inner workings of the minds of great geniuses
when you close a volume of their intimate correspondence--but I prefer
Stevenson's and Meredith's to all the others. They show such wonderful
cheeriness in the face of adversity, such love for their friends
and wives, such an interest in literature and in life. They are so
splendidly natural and speak from the heart. We hear the very voice of
the man we have learnt to love in public talking intimately in his own
home.
We have just had an amazing masters' meeting in which the following
motions were carried:
(i) Masters are forbidden to see more of one boy than another!
(ii) Masters are forbidden to have any boys in their room except for
"turned" work.
(iii) Masters are forbidden to hear "turned" work in their rooms except
between 9 and 1.
(iv) Lower School boys are not to be allowed in any House other than
their own without a written leave from their House-masters.
(v) Boys must never be given the run of a master's rooms.
(vi) In future every one will stand all through the offertory in the
Communion service.
There were heaps more, but these were the funniest. Anything more
priceless than the solemn conclave of old dears passing these
resolutions one by one, with here and there an amendment (always
rejected without discussion) I never saw. If they think that all this
tomfoolery will prevent me from seeing all I want to of Tony, they are
mistaken. It wasn't altogether aimed at me. Apparently quite a number
of the younger masters make friends with the boys. For the life of me
I can't see why they shouldn't. Anyway these "rules" aren't going to
make any difference to me. All through this ridiculous meeting I found
myself repeating Edith Sichel's priceless aphorism: "There is nothing
that cannot be imagined by people of no imagination." It ought to be
inscribed over the mantelpiece of every Common Room.
_December 19, 1911_
We have had some good field-days lately, notably one where I was
in command of a small force, which was told off to harass a large
advancing troop by repeated ambushes. I nearly ran my people off their
feet, but it was rare fun. We just appeared in the most unlikely
places, forced the enemy to waste time by deploying, let them get
quite close and then scattered and met again farther back along the
line and repeated the manœuvre. The whole business was overwhelmingly
successful for we delayed their advance until it ceased to be of any
effect. I prefer this sort of tactical scheme to the usual one of
merely putting out outposts or an advanced guard. The only way to
interest boys in the Corps is to give them some one to fight against
every time. I found this out when I started the night scouts. I have
been allowed twenty minutes nightly in which to practise my specialist
scouts in getting used to working in the dark. It was futile merely
getting them accustomed to using their night eyes; unless we opposed
one another and tried to track each other down, the whole business
failed of its object.
As soon as we had sides they all became ten times more enthusiastic:
both their sight and hearing became more acute: there were some
titanic struggles and much good resulted from these tactics. It is an
eerie business, searching on a pitch-black night inch by inch, over a
ploughed field, for an enemy that you expect to pounce upon you from
behind if he gets the chance. Of course Hallows and Co. did their best
to prevent my having these boys out, on the ground that they would
catch cold--and then that they might get into mischief. For once I
carried my point and had my own way.
I notice that I'm leaving the school buildings far less frequently than
I used to do when I first came here. I have very little temptation
to go off to Scarborough for a "razzle" at the theatre or the Winter
Gardens. About twice a term suffices now. I don't quite know why. Of
course I'm reading much more and I sit up taking notes for books that
I mean some day to write. I still refuse to play "bridge." I go to the
"club" and sing, dance, eat and drink on rare occasions, but normally I
don't go out of my rooms much at night.
I don't spend more time in Common Room than I can help. I just play
my games, work out my schemes in form on the teaching of English and
mathematics, write innumerable letters and try my hand occasionally on
original topics for articles.
Of late the _Pioneer_ has taken several sporting sketches of mine,
which has put a new heart in me.
_December 31, 1911_
Last term ended very quietly. I saw a great deal of Tony in spite of
all the silly new regulations.
It was grand to be back in London again: I spent five days with the
Chichesters at Hampton and we feasted right royally and went to two
shows a day. On Christmas Eve I went down to see my father and mother,
who were staying in Bath for the waters. After the riotous orgies at
the Chichesters I thought I should find Bath boring. I arrived late at
night and was struck by the lights twinkling from hills on every side.
My people had got "digs" close under the shadow of the Abbey. I was
glad to come to a place which had such a wonderful eighteenth-century
flavour, and expected to find out many new truths about Jane Austen,
Fielding, Sheridan, Doctor Johnson, Beau Nash and all the other
celebrities, but no one in Bath seemed to take any notice of the past.
The present was gay enough for them.
So many Army men retire to Bath with a progeny of daughters all of
marriageable age, but possessed of no dowry, that they almost wait
in a queue outside the station to fasten on to any strange young man
who appears. It took me some time to fathom this. I found every one
exceedingly kind and hospitable. I could wish I were a better dancer.
These Assembly Room shows are glorious, but they make me abominably
nervous. I feel all the time gauche and awkward in the presence of
these resplendent youngsters: they can all dance superbly, and in the
first place I am afraid that the cheapness of my clothes militates
against me, and then that no girl could possibly really want to dance
with me when she could secure one of these subalterns or rich young
squires. All the same once I got into the swing of the thing it was
all right. I always found some partners who fitted my steps exactly:
I endured agonies with some tall and unresponsive creatures, who
obviously were only giving me a "duty" dance, but with small girls like
Ruth Harding I got on famously. To enjoy a dance to the full one ought
to know one's partner intimately and dance with her for the entire
night. At the last two dances I got Ruth to dance with me most of the
evening, which apparently scandalized some of the clique which I am
supposed to have joined. There can be no place in the British Isles
where tongues wag so unceasingly as in Bath. It is like sitting through
a scene in "The School for Scandal" to hear the modern Lady Sneerwell
and Mrs. Candour chattering about faithless wives. Not one in a hundred
of their stories could possibly be true, or else we are living in a
most depraved age. It is the first time in my life that I've heard
people openly discuss these things. I can't say that I like it. Ruth is
a good little soul. She knows nothing about eighteenth-century history
but is quite keen to learn. We have explored Prior Park and Castle
Combe, and have searched every street in order to find out where all
the greater celebrities lived in the great days. In some ways the place
has not changed at all since the age of Jane Austen. At one of the
Assembly Room dances I met exact replicas of Catherine Morland, Emma,
and Mr. Collins. They almost employed the same phraseology. Quaintly
enough, not one of them had ever read a word of Jane Austen.
My father and mother love the life here. We take my mother out in a
Bath chair into the gardens and she gazes at all the smartly dressed
passers-by. My father has got to know all the local clergy: sometimes
he takes duty at one of the churches. We have a great number of callers
and there is never a lack of anything to do. It is a welcome change
from the dullness of our village at home. One of the joys of life here
for me is beagling. I go out three times a week with the Wick or the
Trowbridge Beagles. I doubt whether there are a finer set of people
living than the average beaglers.
They are usually poor (they can't afford to ride), they are
passionately addicted to open-air life and are hence sound in mind and
limb. Although one feels at times after a heavy run as if one would
drop dead from fatigue before one got home, yet the sense of exhaustion
is soon ousted by a sense of wild exhilaration in the hunt, the
scenery, the people you meet, and the physical fitness of your body. It
is so splendid just to turn up at some country house and there, among
the sherry and the sandwiches, get into conversation with some flapper
or schoolboy or old colonel, all of whom are full of tales of past
historic runs and anticipations of the day's sport.
One day we ran from Trowbridge right on to Salisbury Plain, and lost
the hounds in the dark by Edington Church--and had to scour the lonely
hills for them until eight o'clock. This was on a night when I had
promised to take Ruth and two other girls to hear the D'Oyley Carte
Company. I got to the theatre at a quarter to ten.
_January 19, 1912_
I spent most of my days with Ruth for the rest of the holidays, doing
all the correct things, having tea _tête-à-tête_ at Fortt's, going to
the theatre on Friday nights (the fashionable night in Bath), walking
over Lansdown and down the Avon valley, beagling together (that was
best of all: she is a superb athlete) and dancing together whenever
possible. Her parents and mine have become firm friends and we are as
thick as thieves. I am not in love with her, but she's about the best
pal I ever had, which is saying a good deal.
I hear that Bath has been waiting anxiously to hear the announcement
of our engagement. What a place! Why on earth can't a man have a girl
friend without eternally being suspected of marriage? Ruth and I have
never kissed or done anything except treat each other as bosom friends,
which we certainly are and probably always shall be.
In spite of the insidious temptations of Bath, to crawl round looking
at the shops all day, or to explore the highways and by-ways of
Somerset, I have both read and written a good deal.
This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or
forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life,
candid, human, extraordinarily real and interesting: their books do
not sell in great numbers, but they occupy a place on one's bookshelf
that one wants to refer to almost daily. All the other thousand or so
novelists don't count at all. I hate the unreality and false glamour of
these popular writers: they are like the halfpenny papers which cater
for a low and vicious, ignorant taste, only to be compared with the
shoddier melodramas that we see on the cinema.
I often wonder how these old ladies get on who crowd daily into Smith's
Library in Milsom Street and ask the girl behind the counter for an
interesting book. She must have her work cut out to remember the
million or so different connotations that the word "interesting" bears
to the circulating library subscriber. I wonder how many of them would
like to plunge into the inconsequent medley which constitutes my diary.
When you see one old lady bearing off under her arm a copy of "The
Revelations of a Duchess," Samuel Butler's "Life and Habit," Gertie
de S. Wentworth-James's latest narcotic, and some of A. C. Benson's
Essays, it almost frights you to think of the aggregate effect of such
a mixture. Talk about mixing drinks! The reading habit seems to be
ingrained in the British public, but I cannot help wondering how much
of the best stuff is ever understood by people who commonly feed on
garbage.
I should like to publish a sort of annual guide to be called "The
Hundred Best Books of the Year," to be divided up into sections for
Parsons, Doctors, Schoolmasters, Socialists, Capitalists, Politicians,
Flappers, Nursemaids, Factory Hands, Maiden Aunts, Subalterns, and
Young Matrons. I wonder how many would overlap. Not many, I fancy.
I don't think criticisms of books make any appreciable difference to
their sale. I have seen heaps of novels, damned by all the papers, go
into five or six large editions and others that have been acclaimed
as sheer genius die at birth. I wonder, for instance, how many copies
of E. C. Booth's "Cliff End" were sold during the first year after
its appearance, yet I can't remember any novel which made so deep
an impression on me at the time. Yet on every bookstall you see
copies of "Paul the Pauper," which every sane man would condemn as
simply silly. It has sold over 200,000 copies in two years. It seems
incredible: there isn't a single human character in the book, not a
single natural sentence: everything is untrue to life in every respect.
The passions are laid on with a trowel. There are Grandisonian heroes
and double-dyed villains: coincidences of a kind which violate every
natural law occur on every other page. The only thing that I can
compare to this amazing book is a Lyceum tragedy and the wit of a
music-hall comedian. I wonder if England will ever become educated.
From what I have seen of girls in Bath I should say that the system
of education in girls' schools is no better than that of boys: they
certainly know a little more about English literature, because their
mistresses read aloud to them passages out of the novels of Charlotte
and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray. They also devote
more time to poetry than we do, but they forget it all as soon as they
leave school. They don't see that these books taken altogether form
a complete introduction to life. The average girl I have danced with
lately seems to have read nothing at all. Her conversation invariably
runs on the same lines. Have I been in London lately? Don't I just
adore Du Maurier and Martin Harvey? Do I rink? Do I hunt? Do I punish
my boys very severely? Am I sorry that I am not in the Army? Do I
like dancing? Do I like girls? Am I an outrageous flirt? Would I like
to sit out somewhere more secluded than this rather open spot? Am I
certain that I had enough supper? Isn't the way Jim Dainton and Sophie
Harrington are behaving "perfectly disgusting"? Don't I love Irene
Fairhaven? Isn't Joyce, or Corelli Windyatt, or Moritz, or Stanislaus
Würm, or whoever is playing on this particular evening, divine,
topping, ducky, dinky, perfectly sweet, ripping--or whatever the word
of the moment is? Shall I be at the Morrisons' on Tuesday or the
Dohertys' on Thursday?
I get most infernally tired of all this claptrap. No one ever says
anything that he or she means: it is all superficial. The girls think
of nothing but their frocks and the effect they are making on their
partners. I want to talk sense and instead have to rattle on with sheer
nonsense. I suppose I am getting prosy and sedate, but I do just love
talking about books and different views on life. I seem to have no
ready change of small-talk. Of course one cannot expect to get to know
all the people with whom one dances, but this constant chopping and
changing is rotten. I want to keep to one girl, Ruth for preference,
all through the night. Then one doesn't have to think of something
polite to say: if we feel like silence we just keep silent, if we want
to talk we talk, about anything that comes into our heads, serious or
gay. We understand each other's moods without having to go through a
long rigmarole of introductory icebreaking. One great advantage of
Bath is the number of clubs and places where one can browse among the
reviews and periodicals of all sorts. How I manage to keep abreast of
any modern work in a hole like Radchester, I can't think. Without the
_Times Literary Supplement_ and the book reviews in the _Telegraph_
and _Morning Post_ I should be entirely at sea. And yet with all
these incentives to read, the ignorance of these townspeople is
extraordinary. They nearly all rely on their bookseller for everything
they read. They leave the choice always to him.
X
_February 23, 1912_
It was appalling to have to leave the comforts of Bath for the wilds
of Radchester. It has been the worst Easter term so far within the
remembrance of man. We were snowed right up from the beginning and
House-fights of snowballing soon ceased to amuse. We are simply
shivering in our rooms. The whole place is one medley of germs. Every
conceivable sort of contagious disease is raging. It is useless
trying to teach anybody anything except individually, for there is no
continuity, one boy drops one day, another the next, six more the day
after.
I have three in one of my sets where I'm supposed to have twenty-six.
I've spent every spare moment in my rooms writing to Ruth, reading and
trying my hand at poetry. Thank Heaven, Tony is still immune. He waits
for me every night after chapel and we stagger across the snow-bound
square with the wind blowing the filthy stuff into our eyes and down
our necks and almost into our skins. One misses games in a place like
this. I hate letting a day go by without taking violent exercise.
I suppose if I were in the City I should be content with Saturday
afternoons, but as a schoolmaster I feel that I can't teach and keep
healthy unless I need a hot bath in the afternoon. The cold bath in the
morning makes me yell with agony these days, but I always keep it up.
I suppose it is good for me. At any rate it is refreshing.
Masefield had a new poem in the February number of the _English Review_
called "The Widow in the Bye-Street." All my boys immediately proceeded
to copy it. He is certainly virile and unlike anybody else. He makes
an irresistible appeal to youth. Of course the outspokenness of his
diction accounts for this, at least partially.
Of late I have been sleeping rottenly. I always like to keep my blind
up, so that I can hear the waves more clearly and see the sea from my
bed. I notice that when the moon is up I get appalling nightmares and
wake to find it full on my face. I wonder if I am liable to moonstroke!
We have cleared the snow off some of the ponds and had some really good
skating. The most ridiculous rules have been made about it, because
two boys were once drowned, a hundred or so years ago. Each House has
to take a ladder and a rope with it, and not more than twenty boys are
allowed on the same pond at the same time. Considering that none of the
ponds is more than two feet deep or ten yards across, such precautions
seem rather unnecessary, but nothing can be done at Radchester without
rules being framed by the dozen to meet all contingencies. Curiously
enough, a tragedy _has_ occurred. The head waiter in Common Room has
drowned himself. We spent half of one bitter moonless night searching
for his body. He leaves a widow and six children. I wonder why he did
it. Was the conversation of the masters altogether too deadly for him?
Was he underpaid? or was it just the depressing conditions? I never saw
a place which so invited suicidal thoughts. The gloom of this coast
at this time of the year is indescribable. All the bungalows down the
beach are deserted and so are the little tea-houses which look so jolly
in the summer-time. The Head Master has played a low-down, dirty trick
on a man called Turner, who only joined us last term. He was quite
young, brilliantly clever, popular and successful with the boys: he had
to rent a cottage about a quarter of a mile away because he was married
and had one baby. His wife was pretty and did a good deal to make the
place habitable. One remembered sometimes even the way to take one's
hat off. Well, he has had to go. His sin was--being married. The Head
Master told him that he had come under false pretences, that the school
could not afford to keep men who did not "live in," and that a wife
caused a man to neglect his work.
_March 23, 1912_