THE MAKING OF AN ENGLISHMAN
[Greek: tên te gar polin koinên parechomen, kai ouk estin hote
xenêlasiais apeirgomen tina ê mathêmatos ê theamatos, ho mê kryphthen an
tis tôn polemiôn idôn ôphelêtheiê, pisteuontes ou tais paraskeuais to
pleon kai apatais ê tô aph' hêmôn autôn es ta erga eupsychô; kai en tais
paideiais hoi men epiponô askêsei euthys neoi ontes to andreion
meterchontai, hêmeis de aneimenôs diaitômenoi ouden hêsson epi tous
isopaleis kindynous chôroumen.]--THUCYDIDES, ii, 39.
I
After the tempestuous months consequent on O'Rane's arrival at Melton,
the two succeeding terms were a time of slumber and peace. The omnibus
study next to Prayer Room became vacant at Christmas, and on our return
at the end of January we found Mayhew, Sinclair and O'Rane in
possession. We found also an ominous hand-printing-press clamped on to
the window-sill, and from this injudicious outcome of an uncle's
Christmas largess Mayhew set himself to produce a weekly sheet rivalling
"The Times" in authority, the "Spectator" in elegance, and the "Junius
Letters" in pointedness of criticism and personality.
Before the term was a month old the Editor had sunk to the thankless and
unclean position of compositor, while O'Rane, with his natural taste for
ascendancy, poured forth an effervescent stream of leaders, lampoons,
parodies, dialogues, stories and poems. It was not easy for anyone of
less dominant personality to get his voice heard or his pen's product
read during the periods of O'Rane's midsummer madness. At such times he
seemed to lose every restraint of sobriety and in a riot of high spirits
would be found organizing stupendous practical jokes or subjecting the
very stones of Great Court to satirical tirades in facile impromptu
verse. Throughout life his vitality was amazing, and from time to time
at school and Oxford it seemed as though he must break out or choke.
Thanks to the printing-press, Mayhew found the circulation of the
"Junior Mathesonian" rising with each issue. I have a complete set
somewhere, and to read again the ebullitions of O'Rane's untiring pen is
to see again the wild, black-eyed, lean-faced, Villonesque figure of the
author. He was always at enmity with someone, and the last word in each
altercation is usually to be found in his weekly "Dialogues of the
Damned," in which the enemy of the moment is depicted explaining to the
Devil his presence in hell.
Beresford, Second Master, headed the list. As a disciplinarian who had
six several times failed to secure a headmastership elsewhere, he was a
formidable authority on the rules and traditions of the school and knew
to a nicety exactly where Burgess's loose grip and casual methods were
lowering the prestige of Melton. Without in any way opposing the
existing policy of letting the Sixth run the school, Beresford gladly
conceded that the Sixth should at least set an example. This, he held,
was not done when one member roamed dreamily along the Southampton road
and engaged in conversation with the varied, disreputable,
semi-seafaring tramps who begged their way through Melton to London and
on whose account the great road was put out of bounds for all juniors.
Burgess declined to limit bounds farther, but supported his colleague to
the extent of a few words with O'Rane--a course that strengthened
Beresford's conviction that Melton was going to the dogs and sowed
plentiful resentment in the breast of O'Rane.
I see no purpose in following up in detail the quarrel with Greenwood
(Dialogue III) over the Promenade Concert and the unexplained wrecking
of No. 1 Music Room; nor with Ponsonby (Dialogue VII-) over the Freedom
of the Press. The "J.M.," smudgily printed by Mayhew and ornately
illustrated by Draycott, was certainly not intended to enter the shabby,
panelled Common Room over Big Gateway. The internecine animosity of the
great, however, is sometimes more marked than their discretion, and
Hanson, who had not spoken to Grimshaw since their whist quarrel five
years earlier, allowed himself to be seen in one of the bursting Common
Room arm-chairs with his feet in the fender and his trousers scorching,
engaged in delighted perusal of the Grimshaw Dialogue. Inasmuch as
Grimshaw favoured the boys of his own house against all comers, he was
unpopular, and the Grimshaw number of the "J.M." was received with
grateful appreciation by all his colleagues, with the exception of
Beresford, who had suffered in silence from an earlier week's attack.
Succeeding issues were received with slightly less favour, as the
minority of victims grew in number. With the appearance of "J.M. VII,"
Ponsonby decided to refer the case to Burgess and with the support of
six actual fellow-sufferers and a dozen awaiting their turn, he
constituted himself a deputation. The Head was sympathetic but not
helpful. The paper, he pointed out, was issued only to subscribers and
seemingly contained nothing of the blasphemous or obscene.
"If it were a matter of wrong, or wicked lewdness," said Burgess,
"reason would that I should bear with you."
"I don't feel that any boy--let alone a Sixth-form boy--should be
allowed to circulate studied insults to the Staff," rejoined Ponsonby.
"If it be a question of words and names," Burgess advised, "look ye to
it."
"O'Rane's in the Sixth," Ponsonby objected. "Unless he's degraded from
Sixth-form rank, what am I to do?"
Burgess affected to think deeply.
"The Lord will provide," he said.
The "Dialogues of the Damned" are an incomplete series, arrested in
mid-course at No. VII; the "J.M.," however, had a life of more than two
years and only died when O'Rane, as captain of the school, had to edit
the official "Meltonian."
A remove into the Sixth at Melton marked an epoch in most lives. There
was, and is, only one Burgess in the scholastic system, and until you
met him five hours a day for six days a week you could form no estimate
of the range of his knowledge. Every school has its Under Sixth, its
Villiers and its mixed assembly of brilliant boys awaiting their remove,
mediocre boys who have come to stay and dull boys charitably piloted and
tugged into the haven of rest because their housemasters do not care to
make monitors of boys in the Fifth. In my time the lot of Villiers was
not to be envied, for the dullards slept, the mediocre ragged, and the
scholars had to do their best to snatch instruction from the ruins of
Babel, assisted by a man whose boast would never have been that he was a
ruler of men or an inspired teacher and whose blood almost audibly
rushed to his head as he strove to maintain discipline.
Thirty years before Villiers had taken a first in Mods., and though the
fine edge of his mind had lost its keenness, he held to the Mods.
tradition that the Classics should be read in bulk. That, indeed, is the
best thing I remember about the man or his system. We scampered through
the "Odyssey," "Æneid," and plays of Sophocles at a great rate and with
no attention to detail. Pure scholarship, if it ever came, was to come
later, and in the meantime Villiers saved succeeding generations from
the reproach levelled against a classical education--that the fruit of
many years' plodding is to be measured by the assimilation of one book
of Horace's Odes or a single play by Euripides. Villiers left us, and we
left Villiers, with more than a smattering of great literature.
In the Sixth we read as much or as little as we pleased. Most of us had
a scholarship in view, and the degree of our unpreparedness was the
degree of attention with which we confined ourselves to the text. Beyond
that minimum the rule was to sit and encourage Burgess to talk.
Sometimes he would forget a book and, for want of fixed work, open a
Lexicon and choose a word at random. He would give us the childhood and
old age of that word, its parents and uttermost collaterals; and from a
single word he would treat of ethnology as revealed by language and
comparative civilization as measured by the limits of a vocabulary. And
from comparative civilization to the institutions and faiths on which a
society is built up--the religion and magic that shroud the dark days of
the human mind.
Even to a temperamental iconoclast such as O'Rane, I fancy Burgess came
as a revelation. At the term's end he showed me a manuscript book
entitled "Notes on Theophrastus." To do Burgess justice we had read
three pages in thirteen weeks; the rest of the book was consecrated to
_obiter dicta_: "The Trade Routes of Turkestan"; "Lost Processes in
Stained Glass"; "The Origin of Playing Cards"; "The Margin of Error in
Modern Field Artillery"; "The Institution of Arbitrage"; "The Minaret as
a Feature in Architecture"; "Surgery in Mediæval China"--and a score of
other subjects. Theophrastus bored us, and we decided to take him as
read. The decision once adopted, there was no difficulty in keeping
Burgess away from the text.
On reflection I think that O'Rane may, in his turn, have been a
revelation to Burgess as much as to the rest of the form. If omniscience
were the order of the day, O'Rane seems to have decided to be
omniscient. It was a fixed principle with him never to bring books into
form. Burgess would look wearily round and say, "O'Rane, wilt thou read
from 'Protinus Aeneas celeri certare sagitta,' laddie?" And Raney, with
his hands clasped behind his back and eyes gazing across to the big open
fire, would recite thirty, fifty or a hundred lines as Burgess might
decide, in a voice that would cause him to be taken untrained on any
stage. In part it was a studied pose, in part I believe he never forgot
anything he had twice read. And his memory was minutely accurate. I
recall a disputation on one of Bentley's emendations of Horace; neither
Burgess nor O'Rane had a book, but each was prepared to go to the stake
for his own version. Sutcliffe was eventually dispatched to School
Library, and a reference to the text showed that Burgess was wrong.
"Where were you before you came here?" Loring asked that evening, when
O'Rane and I were sitting in his study after prayers.
"Guess I was in most places," O'Rane answered from the depths of the
arm-chair and a book.
"Where were you educated, fathead? And don't 'guess,' it's a vile
Americanism."
Loring affected great precision of speech.
"I--fancy--I--received--instruction--from--numerous--persons--in--a--
var-i-ety--of--places." And then with a sudden blaze of light in his big
eyes:
"Much have I seen and known, cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all...
My God! 'honoured of them all!'" He stopped suddenly.
"The next time you break out, you'll get the cocoa-saucepan at your
head," I warned him. "Now answer Jim's question."
O'Rane sat staring at the fire until Loring threw a wastepaper basket at
him.
"If you start scrapping----" he began. "Oh, what was your dam' silly
question? Dear man, I was born in Prague, and, as I never stayed six
months in the same country till I came to England, you can see my
education was a bit of mixed grill. Father ..." he hesitated; it was the
first time I had heard him mention any relation, " ... father used to
teach me a bit himself. And once or twice I had a tutor. And for the
most part he used to lay on a local priest. That's why I can hardly
understand the way you chaps pronounce Latin and Greek. And then the
Great Interregnum, the Wanderjahre...."
"Most of your life's been that," I commented.
"Ah, I did this stunt alone--before I came here. After the war."
"The Greek War?" Loring asked.
"Surely. They killed my father, did the Turks. And when I'd buried him
there was nothing much to wait for. He'd given every last penny to the
Greeks, so I cleared out and came to England by way of Japan and the
States and a few other places. It was all valuable experience," he
added, with a concentrated bitterness that made my blood run cold. When
O'Rane spoke in that tone, I could imagine him primed and anxious for
murder.
"And drunk delight of battle with my peers
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy,"
he went on. "'Delight of battle'! Oh, my God! These poets and modern
war!"
"Did you see anything of it?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I was a kid of thirteen. I saw the--results ... when
they brought my father back to the Piræus."
Loring had been lying on his back with his hands locked under his head.
He roused himself now to turn on one side and face O'Rane.
"Was your father Lord O'Rane?" he asked.
Raney's face grew hard and defiant.
"He was."
Loring nodded. "When he was killed the Guv'nor noticed the name. I
rather think your property marches with some of ours. You're County
Longford, aren't you?"
"The property is. I, Lord Chepstow, am what you would doubtless call a
bastard."
Loring sprang to his feet.
"Raney, you damned little swine----!"
"It's true!" O'Rane answered, jumping up and facing him.
"It's not true that I would ...!"
"Oh, perhaps not. But I've been called it--and by lineal descendants of
the Unrepentant Thief, too. You've got nickel-plated manners, of
course."
"If you were worth a curse, you'd apologize," said Loring, hotly.
O'Rane reflected.
"What for?" he demanded. "I'm not ashamed of my father, Loring."
"You'd be a pretty fair louse if you were. Don't make me lose my temper
again, you little beast."
O'Rane held out his hand with a curious, embarrassed smile.
"Sorry, Loring. Is that good enough?"
"We can rub along on that."
Some years later my guardian, Bertrand Oakleigh, appeased my curiosity
on the subject of the O'Rane fortunes. "The Liberator," after a crowded
boyhood of agitation and intrigue, became so deeply implicated in
certain acts of Fenianism that he had to leave Ireland in disguise and
live abroad for the rest of his life. For thirty years he wandered from
one capital to another, preaching insurrection and being disowned by the
Government of his own country. When the Foreign Office papers of the
period are made public, his name will be found forming the subject of
heated diplomatic dispatches. As a neutral his conduct was far from
correct in the Polish rising of '63 and the Balkan trouble of '76. When
he lived as the guest of the exiled Louis Kossuth, pressure was brought
to bear by the secret police, and he moved north into Switzerland. There
he met Mrs. Raynter, one of the famous three beautiful Taverton sisters.
The influence of Lord O'Rane's personality was not confined to political
audiences: she lived with him for three years, and died in giving birth
to a son. When Lord O'Rane himself succumbed to wounds received in the
Græco-Turkish War, he was only in the fifties. The measure of his power
and sway is to be found less in any positive achievement than in the
terror he inspired in the less stable Governments of Europe from Russia
to Spain.
II
Winter softened into spring, and spring lengthened into the summer that
was to be my last at Melton. The few remaining months are engraved
deeply on my memory as though I lived an intenser life to capture the
last shreds of heritage that the school held out to me. As in a sudden
mellowing I found myself on terms of unexpected friendliness with
people I had previously disliked or despised. Beresford--lank
disciplinarian--invited me to dine in College, and revealed himself
unwontedly human and well-informed on Rudyard Kipling; Ponsonby, whom I
had lightly written of as a pretentious ass, proved on better
acquaintance to be a man of self-paralysing shyness who lived in almost
physical dread of his form; Grimshaw, most stolid of men in official
life, shone without warning as a raconteur and mimic of his colleagues.
I dined or breakfasted with them all, not excluding little Matheson with
his unwieldy tribe of children, and we talked unbroken "shop" and
disinterred old scandals and parted with a sentimental, "You'll be sorry
to leave Melton?" "Very sorry, sir."
The vanity of eighteen is long dead, and I can recall with amusement
that I had serious misgivings for the school's future after I should
have left. For five years and more it had been all my world. I
remembered the veneration with which, as a fag, I had gazed on the
gladiators of the Eleven and the Witan of the Sixth--gazed and flushed
with self-consciousness and shy gratification when one of them ordered
me to carry his books across Great Court. In time I too had made my way
into the Sixth; there was at first nothing very wonderful or dignified
about the position, but by no immoderate stretch of imagination I could
fancy myself venerated as I had venerated the heroes of five years
before. And without doubt I looked proudly on my work in the Monitorial
Council: we had been strict but not harsh, reserved but not aloof,
reformers but not iconoclasts--statesmen to a man. At every point we
seemed superior to our immediate predecessors, and the only bitterness
in our cup was brought by the reflection that this Golden Age would so
soon pass away. It was inconceivable that youngsters like Marlowe,
Clayton or Dennis could fill our shoes. They were boys. I remember that
Loring and I took Clayton on one side and revealed some few of the
secrets of our successful rule; I remember, too, how extraordinarily
Clayton resented our patronage....
The recorded history of the last two terms is meagre, but I recollect
that O'Rane came twice into conflict with authority before we parted.
The first time was an unhappy occasion when the May-Day celebrations of
the Melton carpet-makers coincided with one of his periodical outbursts.
A plethoric meeting of somnolent workmen was being somewhat furtively
held in the more somnolent market square; moist, earnest speakers
declaimed under a hot sun to a listless audience. When Dainton and I
passed through the square, oratory was getting worsted, and the meeting
was summoning resolution to spend the rest of the warm May afternoon in
sleep. Then O'Rane appeared galvanically from the West. And soon
afterwards from the East, with dragging steps and eyes glued to his
book, came Burgess in cap and cassock, his pockets swollen with the
books he had bought in Grantham's.
That night O'Rane spent forty-five minutes in the Head's house--an
unusual time for anything but sentence of expulsion. Loring and I were
walking up and down Great Court with our watches in our hands, prepared
to intercede with speeches of incredible eloquence if the worst came to
the worst. Through the bright, unblinded library windows we could see
Raney pleading; the back of Burgess's white head was visible above his
chair, motionless, and seemingly inexorable.
"What's happened?"
The door had opened slowly and shut with a clang. O'Rane was walking
towards us with a white face that belied his jaunty step.
"It's not to occur again." The anticlimax was an unintentional trick of
phrasing. "Well, it won't. I can't work _that_ lay a second time. D'you
know he sacked me within five seconds of my entering the room?
I--had--to--fight--for--very--life." He breathed hard, linked arms and
marched us off for a walk around the Cloisters.
"Drive ahead," said Loring.
"'Laddie, thy portion is with the malefactors. Get thee gone, and walk
henceforth in outer darkness.' I say, the old man's formidable when he's
angry. I said nothing, and he waved me to the door. I didn't move. 'Get
thee gone, laddie,' he thundered, 'and let not the sun of to-morrow rise
to find thee in this place.' I asked him what I'd done; he sort of
suggested that I really knew all the time. I told him _my_ version."
O'Rane stopped and drew back a step with arms outstretched. "I told him
I'd found that sweet May-Day meeting with potbellied whimperers gassing
over an Eight Hour Day and drinking enough beer to drown 'emselves in.
The May-Days _I_ know were the ones where the mob broke up half Turin
and were shot down by the soldiery: they were men with something to
fight for--and ready to fight for it. These sodden voter vermin! If
they'd organize with their cursed votes--if they'd fight--if they'd do
anything--if they were in earnest----! My God, your English Labour!" His
utterance quickened and his voice grew animated to the point of passion.
"I told these scabrous dogs to put their lousy shoulders to the wheel.
God knows what I didn't call 'em, but they were too sodden to mind, and
I found I was speaking in French half the time. Then they got an idea
I'd come over from Paris to champion them, and they cheered no end. So I
taught 'em the 'Marseillaise,' and half-way through the second verse
Burgess drifted into view. I told him in his library as I'm telling you
here...."
"I hope to the Lord you didn't!" Loring interjected.
"I told him every last word." The Cloisters echoed with his excitement.
"You bat-ears, you don't understand! _He_ did!"
"What did he say?" I asked.
O'Rane hesitated. "He hinted that I wasn't accountable for my actions."
I burst out laughing. The words were so obviously inadequate.
"That's a curious reason for not sacking you," was Loring's comment.
O'Rane's black eyes, seemingly fixed on a gargoyle over Chapel door,
were gazing into infinity.
"He said it was the Call of the Blood. And I--I--I just said nothing."
His voice sank to a whisper. "I hardly understood."
The vision was for his eyes alone, and to us, uncomprehending, the rapt
expression of his face and tense poise of the body was curiously
disconcerting. Awkwardly self-conscious, Loring stepped forward and
thrust his arm through O'Rane's.
"Pull yourself together, my son," he said.
O'Rane shook free of his arm. "You don't understand! But _he_ did. He
knew it all. There was one crossed to France in the Revolution, and him
they guillotined because he was too powerful. And two died for Greece,
and one went fighting for the North and the slaves. And one died by the
wayside as the king's troops entered Rome. And one tended lepers in a
South Pacific island." He strode up to Loring and stared him defiantly
in the face. "And some day men will follow me as they never followed
_one_ of the others!"
"Come to earth, you lunatic," said Loring; and I was grateful to him for
the chill banality of the words.
O'Rane turned disgustedly on his heel.
"You wouldn't understand if you lived to be a thousand," he flung back
over his shoulder.
"Come back!" Loring called. "There's nothing to get shirty about."
"You've the soul of a flunkey!"
"All right; so much the worse for me."
"And anyone who's not got your own servants' half spirit you call a
lunatic!"
Loring sat down on the stone seat that ran round the inner wall of
Cloisters and beckoned to O'Rane to join him.
"Come and cool down a bit, Raney," he urged. "And for the Lord's sake
don't make such a row or you'll bring Linden and Smollet out of their
rooms."
"You've got a bourgeoise mind, Loring," said O'Rane reflectively.
"Agreed, but don't shout," Loring returned imperturbably. "I want you to
tell me--_quite_ quietly--how you prove your nobility of soul by running
the risk of getting sacked for the sake of making an idiotic speech to a
mob of workmen who didn't particularly want to hear you? You tell me I
shall never understand, but do at least tell me what I've missed."
"A soul," O'Rane answered simply.
"It's like trying to argue with a woman," said Loring in despair.
The prayer-bell began to ring in the distance, and we made our way out
of the Cloisters and across Great Court. O'Rane, at the last moment,
decided to stay behind, and we left him curled up on the stone seat, his
thin, clean features white in the moonlight and his great deep-set eyes
gazing abstractedly across Fighting Green. He was back in Matheson's for
Roll Call and sauntered into my study with his hands in his pockets and
a straw in his mouth. The flame of emotion had burnt itself out, and he
seemed cold, tired, and a little melancholy.
"Humble apologies and all that sort of thing," he began, holding out his
hand to Loring.
"You haven't told us why you did it?" I reminded him.
He wrinkled his brow and shook his head in perplexity.
"Didn't seem as if I could help it. 'Man was born free and is everywhere
in chains.' I've been through a bit--trying to get enough to feed and
clothe myself--and it was hell. And sometimes it all comes back to me
and I want to blow the whole world up.... And sometimes I dream what a
glorious thing we could make of life, even for the men who sweep the
chimneys and mend the sewers.... To-day...." He shrugged his shoulders.
"I'd forgotten the everlasting Press. After the kings, the nobles; after
the nobles, the people; and after the people, the Press. So Burgess
says. And Melton's not strong enough to stand the racket if every
beach-comber with a halfpenny in his pocket can read that a Melton boy
led the 'Marseillaise' in Market Square."
"Quite right, too. It gives the school a dam' bad name."
"Oh, I agree--now," he answered limply. "He told me to choose my
punishment."
"And what did you say?" I asked.
"I said, 'You aren't sacking me then, sir?' He said, 'Sacking, laddie?
What strange tongue is this?' And then I knew I was all right.
Clayton'll be captain next year. He'd have made _me_, otherwise. Can't
be helped. And I guess I got Melton in my vest pocket most ways.
Good-night, bat-ears. I'm going to bed."
As the door closed behind him Loring sighed to himself.
"If he isn't sacked for this, he'll be sacked for something else," he
predicted. "I hope it won't be till I'm gone, because he refreshes me.
D'you remember his first term?"
"He's extraordinarily popular now," I said.
"He's the most fearless little beast I ever met. And there's such a
glorious uncertainty about him. One moment he's your long-lost brother,
the next he's slanging you like a pickpocket in about six languages, the
next he's apologizing and shaking hands. I suppose he'll be captain the
year after next. It'll be an eventful time for the school."
O'Rane's other conflict with authority was less impassioned and on a
smaller scale. He had absented himself from Chapel for the better part
of the term, and Burgess one day inquired the reason.
"I don't believe all the stuff they hand out there, sir."
"Have I asked thee to believe it, laddie?" demanded Burgess, who had
almost ceased to expect polished diction from O'Rane.
"Well, sir, if I _pretend_ to believe it...."
"Have I asked thee to pretend, laddie?"
"But if I go, sir, people naturally assume...."
"And how long has David O'Rane given ear to the vain repetitions of the
Synagogue and Market-place?"
For the moment Raney experienced some difficulty in finding an answer.
Then he said:
"I'll go if you want me to, sir."
"Laddie, thou art of an age to determine this for thyself. I am an old
man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this life. Peradventure the
wisdom and truth that were taught me while I hanged yet upon my mother's
breast no longer charm the ears of the younger men. Peradventure
"The Saints and Sages that discussed
Of the two Worlds so learnedly are thrust
Like Foolish Prophets forth; their words to scorn
Are scattered, and their Mouths are stopt with Dust."
Herein thou must walk thine own road, laddie.
"Certain points, left wholly to himself,
When once a man has arbitrated on,
We say he must succeed there or go hang.
. . . . he must avouch,
Or follow, at the least, sufficiently,
The form of faith his conscience holds the best,
Whate'er the process of conviction was:
For nothing can compensate his mistake
On such a point, the man himself being judge:
He cannot wed twice, nor twice lose his soul."
An thou thinkest thou canst learn aught from the life of the man Christ
Jesus, laddie, thy time will not be lost."
Thereafter O'Rane attended Chapel with assiduity until the breaking-up
service on the last day.
For weeks we had been saying good-bye to Melton, dismantling our
studies, packing our books, seeking our porters and groundmen to press
upon them our last tip. The final morning saw us seated betimes at
Leaving Breakfast--a quaint Saturnalia whereat all discipline departed
and every junior in Hall was compelled to read a rimed criticism of the
departing monitors. I recall that Tom Dainton, who had almost
single-handed won the Cricket Shield and established Matheson's in a
tenth year of unbroken tenure, received a rousing send-off; Loring and I
were let down lightly, while Draycott was pointedly informed that his
hair was unduly long and his clothes an eyesore.
We were allowed no reply to the chastening criticism, but acerbity was
forgotten when we joined hands and sang "Auld Lang Syne" with one foot
on the table. For five years to my certain knowledge the long table had
collapsed annually under the unwonted strain; to break at least one leg
was now part of the accepted ritual, and, though Matheson had spent
money and thought on a cunning scheme of underpinning, by dint of
concerted rocking and a sword-dance executed by Dainton, we wrung a
groan from the ill-used board and doubled all four legs into the
attitude of a kneeling camel before the bell sounded for first Roll
Call.
My last Chapel was Loring's first. Catholic or no he felt the service
was not to be missed. We sat side by side, and determined there should
be none of the foolish weakness exhibited by other generations of
leaving monitors. Yet as the organ started to play the last hymn, he
failed to rise, and, as voices all around me began to sing, "Lead,
Kindly Light," I found I could not join in.
From Chapel we went to Big School for our last Roll Call. The prize
compositions of the year were read aloud, and the scholarship results at
Oxford and Cambridge announced. There followed a long distribution of
gilt-edged, calf-bound books; three malefactors were led to Bishop
Adam's Birch Table and flicked publicly across the back of the hand;
there remained but one thing more.
"School Monitors!" Burgess called out.
All ten of us lined up facing the Council with our backs to the school.
The birch was handed to Sutcliffe, who reversed it restored it to
Burgess and returned--divested of authority--to Second Monitor's seat.
The ritual was repeated with the other nine, and Burgess called up the
new monitors. To each of them the birch was handed and by each returned.
Then Clayton, the Captain-Elect, rose from Sutcliffe's old seat,
advanced to the edge of the dais, knelt down in front of the Birch
Table, facing the school, and read the old Latin prayers that--despite
their taint of popery--Queen Elizabeth had authorized us to continue,
always provided we dropped the monkish pronunciation.
The last scene was laid in Burgess's library, where each of us was
presented with a copy of Browning's "Men and Women."
"Peradventure ye have heard his words upon my lips ere now," he said.
"Laddie, these partings like me not. I am an old man, broken with the
cares and sorrows of this world, yet it may be that in this transitory
life an old man's counsel may avail you in the dark places of the earth.
Come to me, laddies, if ye judge not an old man's arm to be too weak to
help you. At this time and in this place will I say but this: Sutcliffe,
thou wilt consume thy days weighing the jots and tittles of learning.
Therein is thine heart buried, and I do not gainsay thee. Dainton, thou
shalt be known in Judah as a mighty man of valour. Thou art ceasing to
be a child and must put away childish things. Hearken no more to the
voice of children playing in the market-place; gird thee for battle to
be a soldier of the Lord. Oakleigh, thine heart melteth away and
becometh water all too easily. Thou hast riches and learning, but little
singleness of purpose. Not for thee the dust of the arena--thou art too
prone to hesitate and weigh thy doubt. Best canst thou serve thy
neighbour by girding on the harness of others; thou hast friends and
kinsmen in the first places of the Synagogue: succour them."
He looked at Loring and paused. "Laddie, I could have made of thee a
scholar, but thou wouldst not. Thou canst be a statesman, but thou wilt
not. The illusion of a great position surrounds thee, and thou art
content to gather in thy vessels of gold and silver, thine ivory and
peacocks, thy choice books and paintings. Anon thou wilt awaken and
question thyself, saying, 'Wherefore have I lived?' Ere that day come I
counsel thee to journey to a far country on an embassage from thy
soveran lord. I charge thee to scorn the delights of Babylon lest, in
the empty show of Kingship, the vanity of gorgeous apparel, the uttering
of words in thy Council of Elders, thou conceive that thy duty to God
and to thy neighbour hath been fulfilled. Laddies, an old man's blessing
goeth with you."
III
And thus we were taught and fitted to be rulers of men.
As the London train steamed away from Melton Station, Loring leant out
of the carriage window for a last sight of the school buildings
clustering white in the July sunshine on the crest of the hill. Secretly
I believe we were both feeling what a strange place Melton would be
without us.
"Six years, old son!" he observed, drawing his head in. "Dam' good years
they were, too. Wonder how long it'll be before you Radicals abolish
places like this."
"There are lots of other things I'd abolish first," I said. It was a
mental convention with Loring to regard me as a jaundiced, fanatical
Marat, and with the argumentativeness of youth I played up to his lead.
"What _good_ has Melton done?" he challenged.
At one time my faith in public schools was such that I generously
pitied anyone who had struggled to manhood in outer darkness. Infirmity
of judgement or approaching middle age make it daily harder for me to
divide the institutions of the world into the Absolutely Good or the
Utterly Bad. It is probably wise to raise up a class of men who shall be
educated and not technically instructed--wide horizons and an infinite
capacity for learning constitute an aim sufficiently exalted. That was
the aim of Melton, and we were well educated within narrow limits that
excluded modern history, economics, English literature, science and
modern languages. We never strove to be practical and had a pathetic
belief in the validity of pure scholarship as an equipment for life.
I still regard the study of Greek as invaluable training in accuracy,
subtlety of thought and sense of form; but I am not so ready as once to
go to the stake for Greek in preference to all other subjects. Again, I
still hold that the character-moulding in a great public school is
adequate--conceivably, however, as fine characters might be moulded in
other ways, and there are moments when I sympathetically recall O'Rane's
impatient oft-repeated outcry that England survived in spite of her
public schools.
The good and bad were so inextricably mixed. Cricket and football kept
us physically fit and morally clean; we learned something of
co-ordination and discipline--as other nations may perhaps learn those
same lessons from military training. We picked up an enduring and
light-hearted acquaintance with responsibility and acquired among
members of our own class a rigid sense of even-handed justice which I
seem always to find breaking down when that same class is weighed in the
scales against another. Most doubtful blessing of all, we were brought
up to the public-school standard of conduct.
No foreigner, no Englishman unless he be of the public-school class,
will ever understand that strange medley. It is triumphantly
characteristic of higher social England in its inconsistency, its
intolerance and its inadequacy; in its generosity, too, its loftiness
and its pragmatical efficiency. I never 'sneaked' though the price of
silence were an undeserved thrashing; I never lied to master or monitor,
though I have adorned my crimes before appearing in the dock; I never
entered for an examination with dates or names scrawled on my cuff,
though I habitually used translations, and syndicated my work with
others in my form. The standard forbade the one and allowed the other,
and I have spent half my life doing things that are rationally
unjustifiable and only to be defended on the ground that they were Good
Form. For all my Radicalism I was not brave enough to fling down the
challenge.
There _is_ no Radicalism in schools--I had no business to use the word.
After devastating the Debating Society with proposals for disembowelling
kings or strangling priests, I have gone back to my study and duly
thrashed some junior who forewent the age-old custom of walking
bareheaded past Burgess's house. Never once dared I stand up to the
conventional, "Thou shalt not brag. Thou shalt not affect an interest in
thy work. Thy neighbours' likes and dislikes shall be thine." The list
could be extended indefinitely, and for ten years after leaving Melton I
was to find those queer schoolboy limitations and inconsistencies
reproduced throughout the governing class in England. "One must pay a
cardsharper," says Tolstoi, in describing Vronsky's code of principles,
"but need not pay a tailor ... one must never tell a lie to a man, but
one may to a woman ... one must never cheat anyone, but one may a
husband; ... one must never pardon an insult, but one may give one, and
so on."
In moments of uncritical pride I judge the tree by its fruit. It is the
public school men, grumbling at their work, who--shall we say?--govern
the Indian Empire, with resentment of praise from others and no thoughts
of praising themselves. Versatile, light-hearted and infinitely
resourceful if cholera sweep the land, they will step from one dead
man's shoes to another's and leave a village to govern a province.
Haggard and drawn with long weeks of eighteen-hour days, they will yet
find time to mistrust the man who is not of their race or speech or
school and growl at him who offends by his clothes or enthusiasm or
aspirates. And the Indian Empire goes afresh to perdition with every new
fall in the rupee or change in the colour of the Government minute
paper. In moments of pride I think of the unwritten law, "Thou shalt
never let a man down": it is the breath of the public school spirit. Yet
criticism tells me that the public schools have no monopoly, and, if one
miner be unjustly discharged from employment, a hundred thousand of his
fellows will come out on strike.
"What good has Melton done you?" Loring blandly repeated.
In his mood of mockery I could not speak of my opal-tinted dreams, my
consciousness that Melton and Burgess had inspired me with a hundred
visions of mankind regenerated through my efforts. At eighteen
everything seemed so easy: the world was blind but not selfish--except
for the high and dry Tories who were to be quietly put out of the way if
they proved obdurate; everyone else would yield to reason--and my
eloquence.
The favourite vision was a crowded meeting swayed to laughter or tears
or passion by my words--a memory of Mr. Gladstone's last public speech
on the Armenian atrocities. At other times when my Irish fluency had
been too rudely interrupted, I pictured myself as heir to Parnell's
heritage of masterful silence. Cold, inflexible, contemptuous--I had
seen him in Dublin when I was a boy of seven, and externals counted for
so much that will-power seemed a matter of compressed lips and folded
arms. I was but eighteen, and my Radicalism a matter of inheritance
rather than conviction. It took years of painful disillusionment to
discover how much fanaticism is required to shake the resolution of
others; and years more to find how completely I was lacking in it. One
morning, when I had attempted to catch the Speaker's eye some fourteen
times in the course of an all-night sitting, I walked out of the House
and spent the day asleep in a Turkish bath; on waking I recalled
Burgess's words, "Not for thee the dust of the arena, laddie." The
superman vision was at last dispelled.
"Well, I had a dam' good time there," I said to Loring, by way of
closing the Melton debate.
In common with many others Loring drew pleadings against Radicalism
which would have delighted a lawyer. To begin with, there _were_ no such
people as Radicals--he at any rate had never met them. The professed
Radicals of his acquaintance were a handful of mere agitators,
misleading a too credulous electorate that was not yet fit to exercise
the franchise; morally the Radical party was negligible because its sole
ambition was, by sheer force of numbers, to take away anything anybody
had got--he for one would never acquiesce in confiscation merely because
a majority voted it. Then in our arguments I would confront him with the
Will of the People--for some strange reason only capable of
interpretation by Radicals. The phrase had a curious hypnotic effect on
us both, for he would invariably retaliate with the statement that the
sole custodians of the People's Will were to be found in the House of
Lords. And infallibly we would both lose our tempers over the first Home
Rule Bill.
"At heart you're quite sound," he was good enough to say on this
occasion.
On reaching London we drove to Loring House, where I spent the night
before crossing to Ireland. A month later we met for Horse Show week.
Loring stayed with me, and we went to Dublin together to join the
Hunter-Oakleighs, who were cousins of mine and at this time head of the
Catholic branch of the family. Half-way through September I put in a
week at House of Steynes, and was not surprised to find that Loring had
included my cousin Violet in the party. In the first week of October we
returned to London, picked up Draycott, who had spent a stifling summer,
loose-tied and low-collared, in the Quarter Latin, and descended upon
Oxford to order the decoration of our rooms.
Draycott had been banished to Old Library, to his present disgust and
subsequent reconciliation, and allotted a gloomy first-floor set which
for the next three years was the scene of "Planchette" séances and
roulette parties. Loring and I had been given one of the coveted double
suites in Tom, and for the length of an afternoon we condemned furniture
and carpets, issued orders to a deferential, tired upholsterer, and
finally emerged into the autumn sunlight of the Quad with a feeling of
modest triumph that there would be few rooms in Oxford to compare with
ours.
On the following Friday we made our first informal appearance.
Writing after sixteen years that have been neither unvaried nor
uneventful, I find that Oxford lingers in my memory as an adventure
never before experienced even in my first days at Melton, never
afterwards repeated even when I lived first in London, or fought my
Wiltshire elections, or entered the House. I like to fill a fresh pipe
and lean back in my chair, conjuring up a thousand little personal
scenes--of no importance in the world to anyone but myself: my first
Sunday luncheon, when I was the guest of Jerry Westermark, and if the
rest of the company were third-year men like him, entitled to an
arm-chair by the fire in Junior Common Room. The first luncheon I myself
gave half-way through the term, my anxiety not to leave out even one of
my new friends, and my anger with Crabtree of Magdalen who invited
himself at the last moment and filled me with eleventh-hour fears that
the food would run short. My first "Grind," where I pocketed ten pounds
by backing Loring, who won the race at the price of a broken
collar-bone. My first Commem. when I lost my heart to Amy Loring. My
first appearance in the schools and my confounding _ad hoc_ knowledge of
St. Paul's journey. My first....
It is always the first impression that seems to endure longest, but
there were friendships I made and lost wherein I can fix no date. Tom
Dainton, over the way at Oriel, dropped out of my circle some time or
other; we nodded on meeting at the Club, and each would invite the
other's assistance in entertaining his relations, but a day came when I
felt unworthy of Tom's earnest and muscular Blues. And I have no doubt
he shook a puzzled head over the "footlers" with whom I had cast in my
lot. Equally there came a day when I found myself using a man's
Christian name for the first time, and the last piece of ice drifted out
to sea.
I like to recreate the atmosphere of eager activity, of new-won freedom
and approaching maturity. Six years at Melton had been a time of bells
and chapels, first schools and roll-calls, compulsory games and "Lights
Out"; at Oxford I was a man, with liberty in moderation to cut lectures
and private hours, go to bed when I liked, organize a banquet and
participate from time to time in wholesale destruction of property, no
man saying me nay. The differences were great enough to mask the
resemblances. I hardly noticed that I was being regulated by a new House
Standard with more than Meltonian observance of taboo rules and caste
distinctions. We wore no College colours, we dressed for the theatre,
and the "Rowing Push" were at pains not to know the "Footlers" who
beagled or hunted. But we were all unconscious and in deadly earnest,
whether we testified to our abhorrence to Balliol, or walked up
Headington Hill and back by Mesopotamia discussing the abolition of
private property or lounged in chairs round a piled-up fire talking and
smoking--and, for variety, smoking and talking.
Not unless I die and be born again shall I a second time know the joy of
living in a city of three thousand men, all of them my soul's
friends--save such as came from other colleges or the despised quarters
of my own.
"Oakum, come and talk to me!"
I can still hear the voice echoing through the morning silence of Peck,
still see a foreshortened face, chin on hands, and white teeth gripping
a straight-grained pipe.
"Hallo, Geoffrey! D'you think I could get one of your windows?"
"Better not try!"
There is a pause in the dialogue while I kick up a handful of small
stones and leap nimbly away from the siphon which Geoffrey Hale has just
stolen from Rawbones, his neighbor across the landing, and shattered in
a thousand pieces not three feet from where I stand. A stone rises.
"Poor shooting!" from Geoffrey.
My next aim is better, and there is the sharp musical note of broken
glass. Thirty heads projecting over thirty flower-boxes chant in chorus,
"Porter-r-r! Mr. Oakleigh!" while I abandon dignity and hasten to the
nearest staircase, to the end that one broken window may be distributed
throughout the College and charged to "General Damage Account." Rawbones
will bear the undivided charges of his siphon.
In the early months of the war I had occasion to spend a few hours in
Oxford. The colleges were filled with soldiers and the Schools had been
turned into a hospital, while Belgian refugees looked unfamiliarly down
from the choicest rooms in St. Aldates or the High. It was the Oxford of
a nightmare, but, though I saw no more than a dozen undergraduates
throughout the city, there was hardly college or shop or house that did
not hold the spirit of a man I had known. Ghostly, muffled rowing men
still ran through the Meadows in the gathering dusk of a winter
afternoon; ghostly scholars on bicycles, with tattered gowns wrapped
round their necks and square notebooks clutched precariously under their
arms, shot tinkling under the very wheels of the sempiternal
horse-trams; ghostly hunting men, mud-splashed and weary, cracked
conscientious whips in the middle of the Quad. At six-and-thirty the
elasticity and _abandon_ are gone, but I would give much to shout one
more conversation from one drawing-room window to another, to spend an
hour pouring hot sealing-wax into the keyhole of a neighbor's oak, to
deck a life-size Apollo Belvedere in cap and gown and deposit him in
Draycott's bed. The power and daring have left me, but I thank Heaven
that the wish remains.
On the first day Loring and I advanced silently and with sudden shyness
through Tom Gate. The knots of men in lodge or street were
embarrassingly preoccupied and indifferent to us. Never had I imagined
that the great personalities of a public school could count for so
little. "The Earl of Chepstow; Mr. G. Oakleigh," picked out in white on
a black ground, reminded us reassuringly that we too had a stake in the
College, but for an hour we were well content to arrange our books and
experiment with the ordering of our furniture, deliberately shrinking
from an appearance in public until the time came for us to present
ourselves to the Dean. In Hall, and on our way to be admitted by the
Vice-Chancellor, we fell in with other Meltonians and offered the
effusive friendship of loneliness to men perhaps previously ignored.
Here and there I met someone I had not seen since private-school days.
Once the alliance was formed under stress of agglomeration, we spent the
remainder of the afternoon in a serried mass inspecting each other's
rooms, ordering wine, tobacco and bedroom ware in the town and at
tea-time valorously venturing into the Junior Common Room.
Within the next two days Loring and I received a number of cards,
unceremoniously doled out by a messenger in short-sighted communion with
a manuscript list of all freshmen worth knowing, as compiled by an
informal committee of second and third year men. A number of Athletic
Secretaries wrung from us promises of conditional allegiance which we
were too timorous to withhold, and our respective tutors propounded what
lectures and private hours we were to attend. Within a week we had
returned many of the calls, ceremoniously and in person, returning a
second and third time if our host were not at home; breakfast
invitations began to be bandied about, and the Clubs in search of new
members examined our eligibility.
As the one Liberal in a room full of silent Imperialists who consumed
surprising quantities of dessert and paid no attention to the debate
beyond applauding perfunctorily at the end of each oration, I remember
impassionately haranguing the "Twenty Club" on the unreasonableness of
Chamberlain's attitude towards President Kruger. At the "Mermaids,"
where the consumption of food and drink was even greater, I read the
part of "Charles Surface"; nay, more, in a burst of enthusiasm I
perpetrated a paper on "Irish Music" for the Essay Club, in those days a
despised and persecuted church not infrequently screwed up in the
catacombs of Meadow Buildings and left to support life on coffee, walnut
cake, pure reason and some astonishingly rich Lowland dialects.
Liberalism burned flickeringly in the autumn of '99, and the University
Liberal clubs contended with flattering rivalry for my unresisting and
largely uninterested body.
The term was still young when Loring was elected a members of the
Loders, and soon afterwards he joined the Bullingdon. As he now dined
at the Club table in Hall, I gathered Draycott and Mowbray, a Wykehamist
named Finck-Boynton and two Etonians, Bertie Grainger and Mark Seton,
and founded a mess next to the Guest Table, whence we could throw bread
at almost any friend in Hall. There we sat and criticized the kitchen,
the High Table and our neighbors, decided a hundred knotty points of
conduct and elaborated a pose which should mark us out as men of
originality, fearlessness and distinction without any of the distressing
immaturity of mind betrayed by our fellow-freshmen.
In looking back on the early days I find something very ingenuous and
engaging in our delusion of originality. Whether we ragged the rooms of
the meek, hysterical Ainsworth (who was alleged to hold private
prayer-meetings and intercede by name for the souls of lost
undergraduates), whether we serenaded Greatorex, the mathematical tutor,
on the night he had a Colonial Bishop staying with him, whether we
established an informal breakfast club at the Clarendon because we could
get no hot food in College on Sundays, we were soberly and seriously
convinced that earlier generations had never thought of doing such
things before. For three years I watched with mild exasperation three
successive drafts of amazingly juvenile men clumsily aping the
achievements of us, their seniors.
New prejudices grew to a rank birth, but one or two old convictions came
to be shaken. I no longer looked on Eton as a forcing-house of
ineffective snobbery, nor on Winchester as the home of well-bred,
uniform inertia; I ceased to say that while one Carthusian was
occasionally tolerable, more than one would dominate and scatter the
most varied society; gradually I found that something might be said even
for men who had never been to a public school. Loring shook his head in
puzzled and not entirely affected disapproval of my social adventures
and, though punctiliously courteous to my guests, would not infrequently
condemn them categorically as "stumers" when they were gone.
Yet on reflection I learned more of men and books from a reserved and
aggressively sensitive colony of young Scotch graduates than from many
a more decorative sect in the first-floor rooms of Canterbury. McBain, a
threadbare Aberdonian, would drift in on a Sunday night, when Loring was
away dining with the Loders, and we would sit till the small hours
talking of Renan and a non-miraculous Christianity. Frazar, who was
taking the Modern Language School, would lie back sipping whisky and
filling the grate with half-smoked cigarettes as he talked of life at
the Sorbonne and the wonderful appreciation of modern French poetry that
he would one day publish. Carmichael, an embittered, one-idea
revolutionary, would throw Marx at my head and give fierce descriptions
of his Board-school struggles before a scholarship set him free to
peddle his brains in the market on equal terms with his fellows. At
Melton we seemed all drawn from one class, brought up in the same
channels of thought, given the same books to read.
When educational reformers fill "The Times" with their screeds, I am
tempted to wonder whether it much matters what a man be taught so long
as he meet enough men who have been taught something else. I worked hard
at Oxford and did tolerably well in the Schools: perhaps they taught me
how to learn, but the gaps in my knowledge when I came down make me look
on the curriculum as "a chaos upheld by Providence." And then I think of
three thousand men from a hundred schools and a thousand homes, flung
behind the enchanted, crumbling walls to bring their theories, ethics,
enthusiasms and limitations into the common stock; and at such times I
wonder what better schooling a Royal Commission could secure for the
plastic imagination of nineteen.
For all our poses Oxford gave us a taste of that world in which most of
us were to pass our lives--an obsolete, artificial, inadequate world if
you will, but the one wherein we had to find social and administrative
salvation. We felt the heavy democratic control of public opinion when
the notoriety-hunting Glynne was ducked in Mercury for giving luncheons
in his rooms to the too-well-known Gracie (I never discovered her
surname) from the florists in the Broad; we saw something of the ideal
Equality of Opportunity when Carmichael went from a scholarship to a
fellowship and then to a provincial Professorship of Economics and
ultimately to an exalted position in, I think, the Board of Education;
by the College cliques and fashions, the social mistrust and jealousies,
the canons and taboos, we were in some sort forearmed against the
absurdities, the unworthiness and irreconcilabilities that awaited us
outside Oxford.
A fruitful lesson of my first term was furnished by the Duke of Flint.
He was a freshman, an Etonian, a "Gourmet" and a member of the
Bullingdon. Any week in which he was drunk less than five times was no
ordinary week; any story that could be repeated in decent company was
not from his hiccoughing lips. Without question the most unmitigated
degenerate I have ever met, the sole excuse to be made for him was that
by inheritance his blood was sufficiently tainted to infect a dozen
generations. Yet I cannot think it was in a spirit of commiseration that
Oxford took the little ruffian to its bosom, inviting him to its
luncheons and electing him to its clubs; there was something at once
shamefaced and defiant in the way his friends proclaimed--without
challenge--that he was "not at all a bad fellow, really; rather fun, in
fact." From the night when he staggered down the High in the purple
dress coat of the "Gourmets," breaking the shop windows with his bare
hand and I bound him up and put him to bed, to the day not many weeks
ago when he died of general paralysis, I watched his social career with
interest.
We none of us had much time for introspection in those eager, early
days. I was swearing rapid friendships, eating aldermanic banquets and
conscientiously flitting from one to another of my new clubs with the
zeal of a neophyte and the greed of a man who knows that after the dull,
inadequate dinner of Hall an unlimited dessert awaits him. Loring and I
had refused to compete for the Melton close scholarships, as the money
was not essential to us, and we could now idle for a twelvemonth over
Pass Mods. and leave three serious years for our final schools. A
minimum of lectures satisfied our tutors, and the rest of the time we
could argue and read and smoke eternally new and expensive mixtures,
which we backed against all comers and changed perhaps thrice in a term.
Once I came near my sole acquaintance with martyrdom. It was in the
early weeks of the South African War, when to be a pro-Boer was not
healthy. The wholeness of my skin and the peace of our rooms were due in
equal measure to the fact that I had many friends and that those who
knew me not agreed with Loring that I could not really mean what I said.
My fellow-rebel Manders, who knew no one and only left his garret in
Meadows to bicycle hotly round outlying Oxfordshire villages preaching
sedition, was incontinently divested of his trousers and hurled into
Mercury.
"These damned farmers!" Loring exclaimed, as he returned to our rooms,
leaving Manders to retrieve his spectacles and wade inshore. "They've
got to be taught a lesson."
"It'll cost you a hundred million pounds," I answered. "God knows how
many men. And all because the said farmers claim the right to keep their
own territory to themselves."
"A hundred million pounds!" he snorted.
"That's what Labouchere said the other night in the House," I retorted,
with an undergraduate's faith in the figures and opinions of others.
"Oh, of course, if you believe a man like that! A man who frankly
doesn't believe in the Empire. A Little Englander ..."
"I shouldn't be surprised if he was right," I said.
"Just for a few pounds you'd rather like to see us beaten," he cried. To
this hour I recall with amazement the passions aroused by that war.
"I'm not in favour of a war against a free people conducted on behalf of
Illicit Diamond Buyers. Besides the few pounds there are men's
lives--and a little question of right and wrong."
"You ought to support your country right _or_ wrong."
"I beg to differ," I said, and we carried the discussion heatedly back
to Majuba and the question whether or no Mr. Gladstone's body should be
exhumed and hung in chains.
The war was to come very near home before many weeks had passed. After
Black Friday, Roger Dainton raised a troop of horse and took them out;
Tom Dainton was given a university commission and followed a few weeks
later. In the Easter term "The Earl of Chepstow" was painted out and
"The Marquess Loring" substituted. The "damned farmers" had added a very
pleasant, easy-going, undistinguished man to the lengthening list of
casualties.
IV
To men of my generation, men who are now in the middle thirties, the
South African War marked the end of many things. I can just remember, as
a child of six, the fall of Mr. Gladstone's third administration. We
were in Ireland at the time, and my father, a few months before his
death, burst into the dining-room with a paper in his hand, his face
white and drawn with disappointment. I can still recall his tone as he
said, "We're beaten!" After that, though I was growing older, I seemed
to hear little of politics. The excitement of the Parnell Commission
came to be drowned in the more sinister excitement of the Divorce. I
remember remotely and indistinctly, fighting a young opponent at my
private school over the rejection of the second Home Rule Bill; two
years later Liberalism went behind a cloud, the Liberal Unionists came
in welcomed and desired, and almost immediately--as it seemed--we were
busy preparing for the Diamond Jubilee.
One thing that the Boer War ended was the Jubilee phase, the Victorian
position of England in the world. Seated at a first-floor window
half-way up Ludgate Hill, I watched the little old Queen driving to the
service of thanksgiving at St. Paul's escorted by troops drawn from
every quarter of the globe. The blaze of their uniforms has not yet
quite died from my eyes. I awoke with quickly beating heart to some
conception of the Empire over which she ruled, some realization of the
gigantic growth in our wealth and power during the two generations that
she had sat the throne. There followed the Naval Review. It was as
though we flung a mailed gauntlet in the face of anyone who should
venture to doubt our supremacy. For more than two years after that
England basked in the consciousness of invincibility.
The early months of humiliation and disaster ended my generation's
boyhood. Until that time there had been nothing to disturb us; the
splendour of our national might seemed enduring, and it needed the
severest of our first Transvaal reverses to remind us that the Jubilee
pageant was over and our lath-and-plaster reputation being tested by
fire and steel. Tom Dainton invited me to a solitary breakfast on Sunday
and mentioned his father's decision to raise a troop of yeomanry. We
made inquiries about the university commissions that were being granted,
and, though I was rejected for shortness of sight, Tom passed with
triumphant ease and dropped out of Oxford for more than two years. At
the end of the Christmas vacation came the news of Lord Loring's death.
Possibly because his son and I were living together, possibly by the
shock of contrast with the peaceful, untroubled life we had led
formerly, the war cloud loomed oppressively over me during my first
year, so that the ordinary existence in college seemed curiously
artificial. We might have been playing in some indifferent show at a
country fair, with passers-by who refused to interest themselves in us.
After a year the country's prospects in the war began to brighten; we
grew used to the casualty lists and masterly retreats; the centre of
gravity changed, and Oxford began to resume her normal life.
At the end of my third year we were to have the unusual sight of men,
who had been away fighting for two years or more in another continent,
returning to resume their position as undergraduate. I was spending the
beginning of the Long Vacation with Loring at Chepstow, when we received
a wire inviting us both to Crowley Court to welcome the two Daintons
back from the Front. Neither Loring nor I had been to Hampshire since
leaving Melton, and, as Mrs. Dainton pledged herself that "all the old
party" would be invited, we accepted with alacrity. Sutcliffe, who was
doing a vacation course at Cambridge, broke into his work to join us,
and Draycott was on the platform when we arrived at Waterloo.
I remember--though it is a petty enough thing to recall--rather
resenting Draycott's presence. He had got into a set that I disliked--a
set that was, I suppose, "at once as old and new as time itself." Its
members went exquisitely dressed in coats of many colours; they made a
considerable to-do with crossings and genuflections in chapel, and
private shrines and incense in their bedrooms. They also introduced an
unnecessary "r" into "Catholic" and "Mass," largely, I think, with a
view of frightening the parents who had reared them in the straitest
sect of Protestantism. If you dropped in on any one of them at any hour
of the afternoon, you would be assailed with exotic hospitality--Turkish
coffee, Tokay, Dutch curacao, black Spanish cigarettes, Uraguayan maté,
Greek resined wine and a drink which to this day I assert to be
sulphuric acid and which my offended host assured me was a priceless
_apéritif_ unobtainable outside Thibet or the French Congo. In college
it was said vaguely that they knew "all about Art"; they certainly had a
pretty taste in bear-skins, Persian rugs and the more self-indulgent
style of upholstery. If their nude, plaster statuettes were once
decently petticoated in blotting paper annexed from the old Lecture
Room, I suppose they were so clothed a hundred times, until Roger
Porlick disgraced himself in Eights Week by punting up the Cher with a
stark hamadyrad tethered as a mascot to the box of his punt. After that
the plaster casts were hidden.
Once deprived of his audience, Draycott had either to drop his pose or
explain it elaborately to friends who had known him before its adoption.
He chose the easier course, and we very comfortably renewed the life,
relations and atmosphere we had left behind at Crowley Court three years
before. The party assembled piecemeal, as O'Rane had to wait till the
end of the Melton term, and our hosts spent some days at the War Office
before they were restored to their family.
On the eve of Speech Day Mrs. Dainton suggested that I should drive over
to Melton and bring O'Rane back with me. In the absence of her husband
she had gratified a cherished aspiration by purchasing a motor-car, and
this was placed at my disposal. In the old days Roger Dainton, who had
been brought up among horses from boyhood, declared roundly that nothing
would induce him to invest in a "noisy, smelly, terror-by-day" that made
life unbearable for peaceful pedestrians in the rare moments when it was
not breaking down and being pushed or pulled ignominiously home.
"He's an absurd old Tory," Mrs. Dainton told me. "Everybody's getting
one nowadays; Lord Pebbleridge, over at Bishop's Cross, has three."
So in imitation of her august neighbour, a car was bought. It was one of
several small changes that the long-suffering Roger found waiting to be
inflicted on him: dinner had been put back to a quarter-past eight and
was now served by a butler and two footmen; to hang about the grounds
till 8.20 was no longer admitted as a valid excuse for not dressing.