IV

I have never known any one to change so little with the cycle of years

as Basil Norman. When he came to Westminster, at the age of twelve, he

had an easy nonchalance, a delightful insouciance, that never left him.

He went from form to form, trod the stone-flagged passages as others

did; but the youth of seventeen that left Westminster bore the same

smiling, detached personality as when he entered. The atmosphere of

tradition interested but did not drug him; the Elizabethan pancake

impressed him less than did a contemporary Edwardian soap-bubble.

Conscientious form-masters recognized his extraordinary abilities, and

gave him the benefit of well-worded and impressive homilies on

achievement. Sometimes for effect they quoted Latin. Norman would

counter with a "Greek remark." He never studied, but more than one

scholar owed success to the eleventh-hour coaching of Basil Norman.

Learning, like everything else, came to him as a needle to a magnet.

With a curious air of detachment he watched the panorama of schoolboy

life, noticing with a discerning eye the various strata upon which

public-school morality is founded, assigning the relative importance of

scholarship and cricket, and nodding knowingly as the process of

standardization brought similarity of speech, accent, thought, and

vocabulary to all his fellows.

He was like a Puck who had never been really young, but who refused to

become a day older.

For a few weeks he played cricket, but without reverence. During a

match he kept up (_sotto voce_, of course) a running commentary of

philosophy which, according to our ethics, was vulgar. I shudder to

think what he would have done if Westminster had adopted baseball.

On one occasion the captain of the eleven took upon himself to point

out to Basil Norman the error of his ways. The worthy demigod deplored

Norman's habit of lying on the grass during practice and inventing

couplets on the various members of the team. The captain also said

that, providing he would take the game seriously, there was a future

for him as a cricketer. Whereupon Norman, from his recumbent position,

misquoted most of the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy, unblushingly

attributing Hamlet's indecision towards living to his doubts of himself

as a cricketer. When he finished he rose to his feet, and our comments

were frozen at the sight of his face.

His cheeks had a ghastly pallor and his eyes were brilliant, but with a

fixed, glaring intensity. And as we looked his expression changed--the

color returned with a glow of warmth to his skin, and his eyes were

gray and humorous. Being boys, we forgot about it as quickly as it had

happened.

The next Saturday we played Charterhouse, and though the score was

heavily against us, Norman gave the finest exhibition of batting I have

seen in public-school cricket, scoring a century and winning the match

for us. He was frail but lithe, and with an air of aplomb batted the

offerings of Charterhouse to all points of the compass. At the finish

of the game we crowded around him, but he smiled a little wearily, and

shook his head.

"I am finished with cricket," he said.

Bewilderment, then anathema, broke like a thunder-shower upon the head

of Basil Norman. We pleaded; we argued; we threatened; then we used

language which possessed the merit of forcefulness and frankness. We

called him a swine, a rotter, a skunk, and an absolute cad. Some one

ventured the opinion that he was a perfect stink, and we all stood

about him like the Klu Klux Klan trying a negro malefactor.

"Gentlemen," he said--and there was a delightful touch of irony in the

word--"you have come to bury, not to praise, me; yet, unlike Cæsar, I

am not ambitious."

"Swine!" said Smith tertius (or was it quartus?).

"In spite of the witty comment of me learned friend," said Norman,

after the manner of the leading counsel of the day, "I have always held

the opinion that life is a thing to be sipped, not drunk. I have played

cricket--_veni, vidi_, I scored a century! I would not spoil me

appetite, milords, by overgorging."

"Your conduct," said Grubbs, the captain, "is rotten. It shows that you

don't give a fig for the honor of the school. If you want to be a pig,

you can wear the cap of one." (We all knew what he meant, and admired

him frightfully for his venture into the quagmire of metaphor.) "We

will send you to Coventry until you come to your senses."

The culprit bowed airily.

"You will lose much more by my silence than I by yours," he said--and

it takes considerable courage to make such a statement to a tribunal of

schoolboys.

If Norman suffered from our aloofness, he took it with the same

nonchalance as he had taken our plaudits. Oddly enough, he had no

intimate friends, and all of us, partly out of resentment against his

pose of onlooker, and more from the love of torture which links the

schoolboy to the savage, performed our duty of silent punishment with a

zeal which deserved a better inspiration. We forgot how he had made

friends with the misfits whose square personalities were being drawn

through the round hole of public-school life. Little chaps he had taken

in hand on arrival when they wanted to weep for loneliness turned from

him as if he held contagion. All the sensitive, shrinking ones about

whom he had thrown his cloak of vivacity, and who were now grown bold

and self-reliant, let him pass from the Little Dean's Yard to his house

and through the ancient passages, a lonely debonair figure that always

smiled.... And no one spoke to him. I, whom he had named "The Pest,"

thus turning my naturally perverse sulkiness into a subject of jest and

good-humor, took a special delight in watching the man who had been

sentenced by his peers to solitude in the midst of a crowd.

His peers?... Was it Smith tertius (or quartus) who used the word

"swine"?

Two weeks had passed, and we were to play Winchester a decisive match

on our grounds, which, as land near the cathedral is rather difficult

to obtain, are almost a mile from the school.

The stage was set. Youthful scholars of ten and twelve walked in their

gowns, their brows knit with thought, their eyes blinking from

over-study. Little chaps struggled under the responsibility of silk

toppers, and conversed solemnly on the deterioration of the tuck-shop;

and the Olympian creature who was the head-boy of the school lounged

outside the scoring-booth as if he were "fed up" with nectar, and would

like some brown October ale for a change--a pose much favored by the

best people in England. There was an excellent audience of the

secondary sex, composed of proud mothers and apologetic sisters, whose

presence was necessitating a sort of Jekyll and Hyde attitude on the

part of their schoolboy relatives, who were endeavoring to be polite to

their "people" and at the same time give the impression to their

_confrères_ that the women were mere acquaintances--accidental dinner

partners, as it were.

No schoolboy of twelve likes to admit to a mother.

Surrounding the field there is a high iron fence, through the railings

of which, or on top, a motley collection of gamins cheer on their

wealthier brethren of the silk hats. Naturally no notice is taken of

these uninvited guests. It is quite all right for them to shout for

Westminster if it gives them any pleasure, but what has a silk hat in

common with a red kerchief and a slouch-cap?

On the day of the match they seemed in larger numbers than usual, and

the top of the fence was covered with urchins, who retained their

position of vantage as though the law of gravitation were no concern of

theirs, keeping up a shrill chorus as Winchester went out for a

moderate score.

With the odds all in our favor we went in to bat, Grubbs, the captain,

and I leading off. The first ball was wide, but to feel the play of my

muscles I took a perfunctory swing at it with my bat. The effect was

extraordinary.... The crowd of Cockney youngsters raised a volume of

sound as if my bat had been a baton and they a chorus.

"Gow it, Pest!" "That's the style, Gloomy!" "Troy t' other hend,

Bluntnose!" "Gee, he's got odd socks on!" "Nah then, Spiderlegs!" (The

blunt nose and the legs I admit to, but the accusation of odd socks was

pure malice.)

The next ball, with no twist at all, bowled me clean, and I walked off

the field to the tune of high-pitched shrieks of delight, and with a

face that flushed a dark red. My place was taken by Smith tertius (or

quartus), whose appearance caused an even greater furore than mine.

"'Ooray for Bones!" greeted the lanky youth as he emerged--"'im as his

the loife of the school!" (He was the most morose of boys.) "'I, Bones,

'oo did you crib from this time, eh?" (A subtle allusion to an ancient

offense which had almost earned him expulsion.)

The first ball came for Smith with an inviting hop. He watched it--went

to strike at it--changed his mind--reconsidered his decision, and swung

at the air as the ball passed over the bails by an inch, a feat which

seemed to gratify our enemies on the fence immensely.

"Nah then, Bones, non o' that there contortionizing!" "'It the ball,

Bones; don't miss it!"

And he did--a miserable little pop into the air; the chap in the slips

didn't have to move a foot to gather it in.

Mr. Smith then added his proof that Shakespeare was right when he said

in this world we have our exits and our entrances.

The next six batters went out for a score of eleven, bowled clean by

the most intimate volume of abusive chaff ever endured by a cricket

team. Skeletons were not only being taken from their closets, but

paraded brazenly before the eyes of the world. The secret history of

Westminster was screamed from the fence-tops.

It was after the loss of our eighth wicket that Grubbs and I, who had

stolen round by the street, stalked and discovered their ringleader.

"That's him," said the captain hoarsely--the situation was too tense to

permit of the niceties of grammar. I followed the line of his accusing

finger--and gasped. There was no mistaking those gray twinkling eyes,

although they were almost hidden behind a huge bandage, presumably for

mumps. He was dressed in a rough coster suit, with a villainous cap on

one side of his head and a bandit's red kerchief about his neck.

"It _is_ him," I said dramatically.

"I thought so," said Grubbs, and cleared his throat. "Norman," he

cried. "Kid--Norman."

The young rascal, who was sitting on top of a post, more like a Puck

than ever, swiveled about and solemnly winked one eye. "Do I understand

that the ban of silence is lifted?" he said from behind the mumps

bandage.

Grubbs considered, and then made a tactful and instantaneous decision.

(Small wonder that a few years later he was entrusted with a war

mission to Washington, of the utmost delicacy.)

"You've had your revenge," he said, "and the joke is on us. Call your

mob off, will you?"

"You're quite sure you wouldn't like us to encourage the remainder for

a change?"

"Quite sure."

"So be it, my captain."

He blew a whistle through his fingers, and in a moment the fence was

denuded of mortals like a tree smitten by an autumn gale. The Blower of

Bubbles removed his bandage, and presented a stocky youth with three

shillings.

"Buy sweets for the crowd," he said, "and mind--play fair."

"Right you har', guv'nor"; and the mob disappeared. And thus ended the

riot of the slouch-cap against the silk hat. To-day, if you are passing

the field during a match, you will see that the gamins are still there,

but they shout only for Westminster.

We were just turning away, when Basil Norman laid his hand on Grubbs's

forearm, as a girl might do, and his eyes had a wistful look.

"Before I change into more fitting garb," he said airily, then

paused.... My breathing seemed to stop at the sight--his face had gone

suddenly white, and his eyes were glazed.

"Grubbs!" he cried, and his voice sounded hollow. "Don't you

understand?... Oh, _you damned fool_, can't you see it's my heart?"

V

After Westminster I went to Cambridge, and succeeded in cultivating the

Oxford manner, by which all Cambridge men are known. When I emerged

from there I offered myself to the highest bidder (a sudden bankruptcy

of my father having made an occupation essential).

A London newspaper was the fortunate winner in the mad race for my

services, though it would have been difficult for it to lose, as there

was but one entry.

I became a writer of power--not quite so much so as the gentleman

to-day who wields his pen as he would a bludgeon, and succeeds in

writing a powerful article each week; but still I was a writer of

strength. I damned the present, doubted the future, and deplored the

past. I became an honored member of the group of London writers whose

entire genius is exhausted in criticism. I secured a bowing

acquaintance with Bernard Shaw, and always spoke of H. G. Wells as Mr.

Wells. It was obvious to me that to achieve literary success in England

one must abuse England--but especially any one who tried to change her.

Some of my _confrères_ sided with Bernard Shaw and attacked

middle-class morality and patriotism. Mr. Arnold Bennett had a certain

following, though we agreed that his Five Towns stories were not really

critical, but merely observant. We did not know at the time that he had

it in him to write _The Pretty Lady_, which was to be neither. For

myself, I was drawn towards Mr. Wells, and hit at everything like a

blindfolded pugilist.

We agreed with Granville Barker that Irving had reduced the value of

Shakespeare by over-staging; and we endorsed the opinion of a dramatic

critic, known to the public as "Jingle," who said that Shakespeare's

lines were often worthy of an Oxford undergraduate.

For pastime we abused Lord Roberts as a monomaniac, and Winston

Churchill as a kleptomaniac with a passion for stealing the thunder of

others. We even argued that the Church had lost its grip, and wrote

eloquently on the value of doubt. With admirable _esprit de corps_

we refrained from attacking the public-school system, though we

realized that one could always get a hearing by so doing.

And every year those schools were turning out their thousands and the

universities their hundreds; every year our number was strengthened by

well-routined brains that took to destructive criticism like a German

to barbarity.

Somebody was writing our puerile dramas; some one was producing the

trash which flooded our book-stalls; some brain was conceiving the

tawdry stuff which was educating the millions in the cinemas.... But we

thanked Heaven that we were not as other men. We were England's

educated class. For the education of England fails to teach one that a

country's art and literature are as vital to the nation as speech to

the individual.

I took a flat in Sloane Square and read Russian novels. Whenever I

discovered a new Russian author, I quoted him as if I had known him all

my life; it used to pain me to find how unrecognized he was by my

fellows. I attended the opera only on Russian nights, and I became a

devotee of the Russian dancers. I used to quote Russian in my paper,

and brought down the curse of a hundred typesetters upon my head.