“'E's dropped 'is knife,” said my interlocutor, and joined in the
search.
“What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?” said a small white-faced sniffing
boy in a big bowler hat.
I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the ground
about us.
“GOT it,” he said, and pounced.
“Give it 'ere,” said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.
I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over to
me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
“No bloomin' fear!” he said, regarding me obliquely. “Oo said it was
your knife?”
Remarkable doubts assailed me. “Of course it's my knife,” I said. The
other boys gathered round me.
“This ain't your knife,” said the big boy, and spat casually.
“I dropped it just now.”
“Findin's keepin's, I believe,” said the big boy.
“Nonsense,” I said. “Give me my knife.”
“'Ow many blades it got?”
“Three.”
“And what sort of 'andle?”
“Bone.”
“Got a corkscrew like?”
“Yes.”
“Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?”
He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.
“Look here!” I said. “I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife.”
“Rot!” said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into his
trouser pocket.
I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubt
if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched my
fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose, the advantage of
two years of age and three inches of height. “Hand over that knife,” I
said.
Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a knee in
my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got me
down. “I got 'im, Bill,” squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose
was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out and hit something
like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be at
me at the same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them all
making off, a ragged flight, footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap,
amongst them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursued
them.
But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and I
doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour required
me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been down
in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist of
disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable unscrupulousness,
kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to be
even with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarily
involve that. They kicked my cap into the ditch at the end of the field,
and made off compactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to
recover my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that and
out of my jacket, and brushed my knees and readjusted my very crumpled
collar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind.
I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a police
station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented that. No
doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.
And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing
indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the
flavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple
brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain
kindly complacency of attitude towards the palpably lower classes was
qualified for ever.
4
But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear
intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to rise and
increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at
last dominate all my life.
It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I never
met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was
some insignificant name.
Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like
some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories. It came as
something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything
else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits;
it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about myself, a discovery
about the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that
isolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last
possess the whole broad vision of life.
It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the
cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance
on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops
towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette
between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades
of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one
of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths--unkindly
critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe,
Monkeys' Parades--the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy
clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their
first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace
collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly
into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk
up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is
a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in
which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that hitherto
has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the
evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I made my
way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public
schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes for me!--and
very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips. And two girls
passed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted
faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools reflecting
stars.
I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as
I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I
turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette ostentatiously
and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.
The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we
had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when suddenly
its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous amazement upon its
mate.
We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
keeping us apart. We walked side by side.
It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times
altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on the other
side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively
caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops
into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we whispered instead of
talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face.
“Dear,” I whispered very daringly, and she answered, “Dear!” We had a
vague sense that we wanted more of that quality of intimacy and more. We
wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again
the scent of flowers.
And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing
that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed through the
common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new
interest shining through the rent.
When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face,
her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft shadowed
throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity....
Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their
house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of small houses
near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they
vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a
moth goes out of a window into the night, and left me possessed of an
intolerable want....
The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work
and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded up and down
that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a thwarted
sense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went
backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing place, and at last
explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never saw
her again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in
dreams. How my blood was stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in
the darkness for her. I prayed for her.
Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her
first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my
imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.
I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about
her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed nonsense
about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not
possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put the book
aside....
I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing
because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and secretive
about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly
and shamefully like a thief in the night.
One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the Strand
an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its dusky
encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-shouldered, bare-breasted
Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my way,
then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing
is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have it
framed and hung in my room open to the criticism of my friends, but I
kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked
for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often when I
had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it
before me.
Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time
nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was locked in me.
I seemed as sexless as my world required.
5
These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and
below and before me. They had an air of being no more than incidents,
interruptions.
The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants
School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the mooning
explorations of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the
restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices,
giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant spaces between the
woven threads of a school-boy's career. School life began for me every
morning at Herne Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other
boys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the streets and
roads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact,
the storms of rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's
London have passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of
them again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate
still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-proportioned
kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science
laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are
unaltered except for the big electric trams that go droning and spitting
blue flashes along the western boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head,
very well, but I have not been inside the school to see if it has
changed at all since I went up to Cambridge.
I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of
vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's estate and
developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process
and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the
educational methods pursued, their aimless disconnectedness from the
constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the
public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced
to happen, we must treat it as having a definite function towards the
general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the
crude young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct
his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the
contemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influence
and control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and set up
for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not
to feel how infinitely more effectually--given certain impossibilities
perhaps--the job might be done.
My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about me
was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that
filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination
to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school not only offered no key
to it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were
within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government
offices of a fifth of mankind were all within an hour's stroll, great
economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed
with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed
came trailing in procession through the winter-grey streets, now the
newspaper placards outside news-shops told of battles in strange places,
now of amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and
poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was the
background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and through
the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things.
We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek
epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down
into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for
all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our
blackened and decayed portals by Inigo Jones.
Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and
Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us did not
habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more
now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the
utmost our men read them. We were taught these languages because long
ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape
from the narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin,
and afterwards Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and
amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of
initiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the
world. I can imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and
Roper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely, patriotically,
because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the irresistible
stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new great
world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had assimilated
all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet more
amazing developments of its own. But the City Merchants School still
made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with no
thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream amidst the harvesting.
There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up
to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of our
curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was
impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of
the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and failed to button up
a sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection
a reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He
admitted that translation had now placed all the wisdom of the past at
a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained
in which modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient
achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there was, he said, a
peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of
instruction possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening and
orderly discipline for the mind.
He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
Classic!
Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making out a case. In schools
as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available, the sort of
assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could
see no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint,
sustained constructive effort and various yet systematic adjustment. And
that was as far as his imagination could go.
It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them;
the curriculum and the social organisation of the English public school
are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have begun.
Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our
founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic
values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.
But public schools and university colleges sprang into existence
correlated, the scholars went on to the universities and came back to
teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before
they had ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys
herded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same,
adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. In
a century, by its very success, this revolutionary innovation of
Renascence public schools had become an immense tradition woven closely
into the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people
ceased to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but
that only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been through
the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade them that
it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could
devise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange to
them. There was all the machinery and all the men needed to teach the
old subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose.
Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninviting
alternative to the classical grind. It was certainly an altogether
inferior instrument at that time.
So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We would sit
under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had fallen
into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us
up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would
lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the class-room mouthing
great lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face and
shining eyes if it was not “GLORIOUS.” The very sight of Greek letters
brings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our
class-room, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of
his alpaca gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding
of his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would
consent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We
all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these strange
sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic
intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing
lights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. That
indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek and
Latin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty that was neither
classic nor deferred to classical canons.
And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it best?
We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical difficulties,
the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out
protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of
incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest, of gods faded
beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a
moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought
of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes of our school
performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things
to life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre,
a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of construing as
one looked at it.
Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall....
And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the evening
light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract, London in
black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom
of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power
and courage to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about one,
joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never Greek
nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went
lumbering past, bearing countless people we knew not whence, we knew
not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one, a thousand
appeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights
of window and street mingled with the warm glow of the declining day
under the softly flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards,
the shouting news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the
globe. One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice
of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
gesticulations....
That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living
interests where it might have done so. We were left absolutely to the
hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons
of the comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for
any general ideas whatever about the huge swirling world process
in which we found ourselves. I always look back with particular
exasperation to the cessation of our modern history at the year 1815.
There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon something
indelicate....
But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief cricketer on
the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place
of this or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter
of supreme importance to boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate
interest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural
enthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when some well-trained boy,
panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening paper! “I say, you
chaps, Middlesex all out for a hundred and five!”
Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the
first class. I applied myself industriously year by year to mastering
scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places
nearest Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight
mistake about the county boundary I adopted Surrey for my loyalty,
though as a matter of fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in
Kent. It did quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and
fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to bowl Flack out. He
was a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbed
very easily to a low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was
caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl him before he got
caught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him
at the practice nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to
make him feel nice again.
Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been
observed, going across the Park on his way to his highly respectable
club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief
dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer,
over the trees towards Buckingham Palace. The hit accomplished, Flack
resumed his way.
Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him in terror, needlessly
alert.
6
These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant
and more than a little incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels,
I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns, a uniform which
greatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates,
the head, was a lean loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I
reached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple
and very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, with an almost conical
baldness, with a grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the
stresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression of
puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made
a tall dignified figure in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me
only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong
surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of
the old school families, the Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the
Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after generation.
I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brown
book-backs in the old library in which we less destructive seniors were
trusted to work, with the light from the stained-glass window falling
in coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having no
colour of his own. He had a habit of scratching the beard on his cheek
as he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things and
invariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was “maintaining the
traditions of the school.”
He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a
man captured and directed by a school. Dead and gone Elizabethans had
begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.
Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist
that made for change, Gates did at times display a disposition towards
developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits
were carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions
from our curriculum, and particularly at our want of German. Moreover,
four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the
old Big Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school.
Gates used to come and talk to us older fellows about these things.
“I don't wish to innovate unduly,” he used to say. “But we ought to get
in some German, you know,--for those who like it. The army men will be
wanting it some of these days.”
He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the
lower boys in Big Hall as a “revolutionary change,” but he achieved it,
and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at
which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety
inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, “with grave misgivings.”
And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced,
morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in
the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters'
Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it,
dear soul! to the power of the sword....
I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the
effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall. But that
is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to
complete illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his
thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way
through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant
prepositions. And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that
what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoided
altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short
arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us
towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness
in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to
indicate in those transitional years.
7
The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because
I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of
a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my
private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family
traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first
that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very
little bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were only
three fights--but I followed my own curiosities. I was already a
very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was also
intensely interested in modern warfare. I read the morning papers in
the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated
weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE
on my way home.
I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified
puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious
reader of everything but boys' books--which I detested--and fiction. I
read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular
zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite
subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figure
at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine
quality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its
Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian
extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence
pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all
about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things were
certainly not the living and central interests of my life.
I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masters
even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely with
one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for
East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a
map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays
in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies
before steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that
there was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the
Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. But Britten had come
up through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on
the way. It gave him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these
pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that,
by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions
concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. We
became congenial intimates from that hour.
The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower
Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment between the
books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human
intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, and
aired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas,
the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were both
day-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks
and expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague
prowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I went
several times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one
of whom was a medical student and let us assist at the dissection of a
cat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went
with parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and
galleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close
quarters. We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by
that made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks
and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
places together.
We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, “Phantom
warfare.” When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both
developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us
as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed
along on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting
ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to
house. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with
the pits and trenches I had created to check a victorious invader coming
out of Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly important as the
scene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops
(who had seized the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a
royalist army--reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known
to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a success
of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed defences and
assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards
we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of the
Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.
A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's
luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both
to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton
Hall. We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a
couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot
hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated
set of rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of
our leisure. Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.
And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write,
for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had discovered Lamb
and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY
GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain
things we wanted to drag out into the light of expression. Britten had
got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and
RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic
solicitudes talking. I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen,
I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessing
shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thought
every one who mattered had read Lucretius.
When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly,
and died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in
my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire
uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy
solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a mile and a half
from the school. So it was I came right into London; I had almost two
years of London before I went to Cambridge.
Those were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us
continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued
the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname
of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with
dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and
fair-haired and some inches taller than he. Our talk ranged widely and
yet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with
politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William
Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism
pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help
of Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural
History Museum in Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground
floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our
Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did exhaustively. But on
the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or
sexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our
lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness. And I do not believe we ever had
occasion either of us to use the word “love.” It was not only that we
were instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed
of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters. We
evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation
of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our
boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret
literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological
caricature. Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloud
from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed
the precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration
of some of our earliest lucubrations.
For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's
first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to
the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some
years. But there we came upon a disappointment.
8
In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys,
and notably one for whom our enterprise was to lay the foundations of a
career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now
Lord Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rather
good-looking boy who was chiefly eminent in cricket, an outsider even as
we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached to
observe him, with private imaginings very much of the same quality
and spirit as our own. He was, we were inclined to think, rather a
sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style,
played chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and earned
Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the invariable
neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a
vigour that we found extremely surprising and unwelcome.
Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our project
modestly as a manuscript magazine of satirical, liberal and brilliant
literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of
ideas that teemed within us was to find form and expression; Cossington,
it was manifest from the outset, wanted neither to write nor writing,
but a magazine. I remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's
study--we had had great trouble in getting it together--and how
effectually Cossington bolted with the proposal.
“I think we fellows ought to run a magazine,” said Cossington. “The
school used to have one. A school like this ought to have a magazine.”
“The last one died in '84,” said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. “Called
the OBSERVER. Rot rather.”
“Bad title,” said Cossington.
“There was a TATLER before that,” said Britten, sitting on the writing
table at the window that was closed to deaden the cries of the Lower
School at play, and clashing his boots together.
“We want something suggestive of City Merchants.”
“CITY MERCHANDIZE,” said Britten.
“Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder, and it
seems almost a duty--”
“They call them all -usians or -onians,” said Britten.
“I like CITY MERCHANDIZE,” I said. “We could probably find a quotation
to suggest--oh! mixed good things.”
Cossington regarded me abstractedly.
“Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?” said Shoesmith, who
had a feeling for county families, and Naylor supported him by a murmur
of approval.
“We ought to call it the ARVONIAN,” decided Cossington, “and we might
very well have underneath, 'With which is incorporated the OBSERVER.'
That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and all
that, and it gives us something to print under the title.”
I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. “Some
of the chaps' people won't like it,” said Naylor, “certain not to. And
it sounds Rum.”
“Sounds Weird,” said a boy who had not hitherto spoken.
“We aren't going to do anything Queer,” said Shoesmith, pointedly not
looking at Britten.
The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. “Oh! HAVE it
ARVONIAN,” I said.
“And next, what size shall we have?” said Cossington.
“Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE--or LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is better
because it has a whole page, not columns. It makes no end of difference
to one's effects.”
“What effects?” asked Shoesmith abruptly.
“Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer for
a double column. It's nuggetty. You can't get a swing on your prose.” I
had discussed this thoroughly with Britten.
“If the fellows are going to write--” began Britten.
“We ought to keep off fine writing,” said Shoesmith. “It's cheek. I vote
we don't have any.”
“We sha'n't get any,” said Cossington, and then as an olive branch to
me, “unless Remington does a bit. Or Britten. But it's no good making
too much space for it.”
“We ought to be very careful about the writing,” said Shoesmith. “We
don't want to give ourselves away.”
“I vote we ask old Topham to see us through,” said Naylor.
Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. “Greek epigrams on the
fellows' names,” he said. “Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a
stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine.”
“We might do worse than a Greek epigram,” said Cossington. “One in each
number. It--it impresses parents and keeps up our classical tradition.
And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of
course--we've got to departmentalise. Writing is only one section of the
thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school. There's questions
of space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk of
printed prose like--like wet cold toast and call it a magazine.”
Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
“There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that.”
“I'm not going to do any fine writing,” said Shoesmith.
“What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to
their play:--'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the place for
extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' Things
like that.”
“I could do that all right,” said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly
becoming pregnant with judgments.
“One great thing about a magazine of this sort,” said Cossington, “is
to mention just as many names as you can in each number. It keeps the
interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little
bit. Then it all lights up for them.”
“Do you want any reports of matches?” Shoesmith broke from his
meditation.
“Rather. With comments.”
“Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,” said
Shoesmith.
“Shut it,” said Naylor modestly.
“Exactly,” said Cossington. “That gives us three features,” touching
them off on his fingers, “Epigram, Literary Section, Sports. Then we
want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything
that's going on. So on. Our Note Book.”
“Oh, Hell!” said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
disapproval of every one.
“Then we want an editorial.”
“A WHAT?” cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
“Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
page. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something manly and
straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRIT
DE CORPS, or After-Life.”
I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington mattered
very much in the world.
He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at
a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailed
vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most acceptable
in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about us, and had
determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as it
were, synthetically plagiarised every successful magazine and breathed
into this dusty mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his own
suggestion managing director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith and
Naylor, and conducted the magazine so successfully and brilliantly that
he even got a whole back page of advertisements from the big sports shop
in Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate for a notice
of certain books of their own which they said they had inserted by
inadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in the
first number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in
depreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending
with that noble old quotation:--
“To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.”
And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the
“Humours of Cricket,” and the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all
over the editorial under the heading of “The School Chapel; and How it
Seems to an Old Boy.”
Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace
or precision what we felt about that magazine.