It is strange about that picnic; I remember so little about it.
It merges in my mind into so many others. I remember that we
went up the Cherwell; a long way up, past Water Eaton and under
Islip Bridge, and that we had tea and supper, and came back late;
but all that was the same as many other picnics, and I cannot
remember anything distinctive about this one, except being in
a canoe with Walter for a part of the time, and finding him hard
to talk to.
It is curious to realize that it made so little impression on
my mind when it made so much on his. He told me afterwards that
he had hesitated about coming. He wanted to finish a bit of work
that afternoon, and then George ran into him in the quad and
asked him to come.
‘Half-past two at Guy Laurier’s rooms,’ George had said, and
he had answered: ‘Oh, thanks awfully. I’d love to come,’ and
gone on to his room, thinking; ‘I needn’t go, after all, if I
don’t want to. I’ll wait and see what I feel like when the time
comes.’
And he had gone back to his own room and worked at Demosthenes
all the morning. By lunch-time he had almost finished what he
was doing. He had lunch in his own room, and then went on with
the work. He heard the clock strike two, and remembered George,
but he said to himself: ‘I needn’t decide yet. I don’t think
I will go.’
Then he got intent on his work, and really forgot when it was
half-past. When he came to a pause it was nearly three; he looked
at his watch and remembered George again.
‘The Lauriers and their cousin and my sister,’ George had said.
Walter was shy of girls, especially the kind of girls he imagined
us to be, and he had even then a sort of prejudice against Guy
and Hugo.
He says that he was irritated by their air of superiority, when
he knew they had nothing to be superior about. But I believe
he was attracted by them too, and annoyed with himself for being
attracted. He says that he decided first that it was too late
to go, and then thought, ‘If I don’t go, it will be because I
am afraid of them, and afraid of going at the wrong time’; and
that decided him the other way. As soon as he decided to go he
became in a great hurry, and ran all the way down New College
Lane. He said he felt a fool when he tumbled on the stairs, and
he said he knew we thought him funny. That made me ashamed, for
I had not supposed he would see what we thought at all. That
was always happening, though, with Walter. He seemed so stupid
at times, as though he didn’t understand anything one was feeling
or thinking at all, and then long afterwards one found out that
he had understood quite a lot.
He said that he looked at me as he came into the room, and that
he thought me beautiful, and different from anything he had ever
seen before. Of course poor Walter had not seen many women before
besides his mother and Maud, and of course I was quite different
from them—and that then he wished that he had not come. He said
that he felt suddenly that his clothes were all wrong, and he
remembered that he had not brushed his hair before he came out,
and that for the first time in his life he wished he was different
from what he was, handsomer and smarter, and more like what he
despised as a rule.
‘I blessed George Addington,’ he said afterwards, when he was
talking to me about that afternoon. ‘He was the only person who
made me feel at ease. I forget now what he said—something quite
ordinary—but I didn’t feel he was sizing me up and not quite
liking me, as I did with the rest of you.’
He said that he went a long way with me in a canoe and that we
talked about New College and the windows in the Chapel, and that
he was impressed by my knowledge of stained glass.
That too is funny, for I never knew much about glass, nor was
much interested in it, and I don’t remember talking about it
at all.
He says that I was kind to him, not snubby or supercilious as
he had expected. Why he should have expected that I can’t understand.
Neither Guy nor Hugo was snubby, and certainly not George.
He was afraid I should be annoyed at going in the boat with him.
I don’t suppose I minded which boat it was. We were all quite
near together as far as I remember, and I was very happy on those
picnics.
He said that he felt envious of Guy and Hugo because they were
often with me, and he felt they were not good enough for me:
‘Just the idle commoner type,’ he called them—and that I was
better than that. He knew even at the time he told me that he
had been wrong about them; he got to understand something of
them both in the end, but never very much. He was never fair
to them, nor they to him, but they realized it more than he did.
At that time, too, he thought me much cleverer than I am.
Walter could not care for anyone whom he did not think clever,
and he did care for me. He has told me how he went back to his
rooms after that picnic and stood by the window in the dark,
and said to himself over and over again:
‘I am in love—I am in love with Helen Woodruffe,’ and that he
could not sleep that night, but walked about his room till early
morning. It seems curious to me when he was feeling so much I
should have felt so little; that I should have had no notion
of what was going on in his mind.
I suppose it was like Hugo. I had just not been thinking about
him.
V
Guy went down from Oxford at the end of that term. He took a
First Class in History, and then started reading for the Bar.
It always annoyed Walter that Guy had got a first, for Walter
felt these distinctions very important. He used to talk of people
as first-class intellects or ‘the sort of man who might get a
Second in History,’ and I know he considered Guy should belong
to the second group. He said once that he didn’t think much of
the Oxford History School, because such obviously second-rate
people could get firsts in it, and I thought he was thinking
of Guy.
I never could see that it mattered very much, or meant very much.
George got a first too in his examination, ‘Greats,’ which was
the same that Walter did himself, and Hugo only a second. Walter
used to say of Hugo later on that he was good material wasted;
that he might have been the scholar type if he had ever been
taught to work.
Hugo liked the work he did for that examination. He read a lot
of Greek philosophy and got excited about it. He used to read
it to me in the vacations at Yearsly and translate it as we went
along. We read Plato like that one summer, lying in the hay,
one particular ‘pike’ of hay, on the way to the Temple. It was
wonderful stuff, and the idea of one’s ideas and thoughts being
as real as the actual world pleased both of us. I had always
felt that, and so did Hugo, but I did not know that serious people
thought so too.
Hugo said he would teach me Greek, and we began it that summer,
and we went to see Greek plays in London; but I didn’t get very
far, and we gave it up after a while, and I read the translations
instead.
Guy took some rooms in Clifford’s Inn. He took four rooms, for
Hugo was to come and live there too when he went down. Hugo meant
at this time to go into the Civil Service.
There had been a great deal of discussion about Hugo’s career.
Cousin John had wanted him to go into the Diplomatic Service,
but Hugo did not want that. He could not be always so polite,
he said, and that made us all laugh, for it was a joke against
Hugo that he was too polite; that he could not be rude or disagreeable
to anyone, and sometimes people were annoyed with him because
of it, because they thought he had agreed with them when he had
not.
Then he thought he would like to be a Curator in a museum, in
the South Kensington Museum if possible. But George Addington
was going in for the Civil Service as soon as he had finished
at Oxford, and it was his idea, I think, that Hugo should do
so too.
That next Easter we were all in London: George with Mollie, and
Hugo with Guy. They all came to Campden Hill Square. Grandmother
made them welcome.
They came and went when they liked, and so did I. It was wonderful,
I think now, how she managed with us all. We felt perfectly free,
we were free, and yet I believe she knew all that was going on,
and was watching us and thinking about us a great deal.
In these later years I got to know my grandmother much better.
She had seemed, when one was a child, a little alarming, much
farther off than Cousin Delia. I don’t think she cared for children
naturally, as Cousin Delia did, but now we were older she understood
us more, and we her, and we found that she was not alarming at
all, but very witty, and full of vitality, and interested in
everything that went on.
She was much more lively than Cousin Delia, and I suppose more
intellectual.
She read a great deal. Every night when she went to bed she used
to read for two hours or more, every sort of book. She had read
the French, Italian and English poets, but she did not care much
for poetry. She had read the Fathers of the Church and the German
Mystics, but she did not care for religion. What she enjoyed
most, I think, were the French Encyclopædists, and the French
eighteenth-century memoirs. She was, I used to think, very like
an eighteenth-century great lady.
When Guy and Hugo came to meals, or George and Mollie, she talked
to them quite frankly and simply as though they were contemporaries
of her own, but afterwards, almost always, she would go up to
her own sitting-room, she had a big sitting-room of her own at
the top of the house, and leave them downstairs with me. There
was no fuss about it. We never felt hurt that she did not want
us, nor yet that she was hurt at our not wanting her. There was
no beating about the bush with Grandmother.
‘Aunt Gerry is wonderful,’ Guy once said. ‘It is like talking
to a man when you talk to her, not to an old lady.’
She was fonder of Guy than of Hugo. I sometimes thought her a
little impatient with Hugo, but I think she loved him too in
her own undemonstrative way. George and Mollie pleased her very
much.
‘They are refreshing,’ she said the first time they had come
to the house. ‘They do me good’; and after a pause while she
was polishing her spectacles she put them on, and added, looking
at me: ‘I did not know Hugo had so much good sense.’
She meant, I knew, as to choose such sensible friends, and also
a little to tease me, for she thought me too uncritical of Hugo.
So I only laughed and said: ‘Perhaps it was they who had the
good sense,’ and she laughed too and said: ‘Perhaps it was.’
I had defended Hugo at first when she criticized him. That had
amused her, and she did it more, but she never was unkind about
him. She never said things that really hurt either him or me.