Lions and Shadows, Page 4

  The wind that surges from the wold

  Crested with cloud and filled

  With groping passion for crude wastes

  The man has scored and tilled,

  Quiver about the Spring flowers

  That tremble in the field.

  As She goes from the cobble ways

  And from the echoing town,

  Sunlight is purer than white wine,

  The hills are pranked with brown,

  The Devil’s Bowl is filled with sky

  Upon a far green down.

  Her sudden eyes that brim with flame

  Of life, are not less clear

  Than those swift stars of sunlight lithe

  That flit above her hair.

  And then it seems her lips are ghosts

  Of shadows that once were.

  This is the death of all despair—

  A kiss of Spring at heart,

  To rest with her quite secretly

  As she turns to depart.

  I think the hills are made with light

  Drawn from a turquoise sky.

  And the woodland is thronged with voices

  Of Life; and daws that cry

  Seem phantoms of withheld delight

  Made in bright mimicry

  Of the unseen, birdlike soul of Spring

  That is eternity.

  The wind from wraithlike tarns of sky

  Is a torrent that bears

  Music and impulse to the leaves

  Glinting above, and fares

  Dimly with her amongst dwarf trees

  Lapped round with low grass spears.

  There is a thought that she will long

  To pause tiptoe and creep

  Into the brooding, shadowy trees,

  And rest, and go to sleep

  So that she does not hear the leaves

  Above her head that weep.

  Surely there is no kiss at all

  Deep as this kiss the Spring

  Wreathed with all brightness takes away

  From her heart quivering

  For joy of the beauty that seems

  In wandering.

  And the strayed hound lurks silently

  Under those trees, and lies

  Couched with the weevil and the worm,

  Gazing from sheenless eyes,

  Where in that latticed gloom of boughs

  The leprous sunlight dies …

  There is a pause. Then Chalmers says abruptly: ‘That’s all.’ Hastily stuffing the papers back into his pocket, he begins to light his pipe with nervous fingers; the mouthpiece between his lips, he mutters: ‘What do you think of it?’

  I forget what words I used. I tell him that this is his best poem and that now I am certain, absolutely convinced, that he is going to be a really great poet, the greatest of our generation. My voice trembles with excitement; I keep my eyes fixed on the roofs of the distant village, because they are full of tears. Chalmers is moved, too. ‘Do you honestly like it? I’m glad …’ After this, we are too happy and excited to say any more. From the top of our little cliff, we gaze into the future. The vision of Chalmers’ destiny, on that wonderful afternoon, seems quite impersonal. It is a triumph in which we can both equally share.

  There are several more pictures—of dreary Modane, where our luggage, which had been on a trip by itself across the Italian frontier, had to be opened at the Customs; of Briançon, surrounded by Vauban’s fortifications, which I couldn’t properly admire because I had eaten a bad prawn at a restaurant on the Col du Galibier; of Grenoble, where we stopped only a few hours, en route for Paris—but all these are merely old photographs, faded and quite dead. I had lost the first freshness of my interest in the Continent. My British digestion, accustomed to watery junket and school meat, had at length registered the inevitable protest against properly cooked, tasty food; after my return to England I was ill for some weeks. The only two memories I can rescue from our final three days in Paris are of a water-closet without a seat and of a man trying to pull a sword out of a tree. The latter was at the Opéra, during a very long performance of Die Walküre, towards the end of which I fell uneasily asleep.

  The autumn term which followed this holiday was the twelfth and last of my public school life. Now, for the first time, I had a study of my own, and two fags to keep it clean. The fags were both new boys, their names were Berry and Darling. I caused my friends much amusement whenever I shouted down the passage: ‘Berry, darling!’ or ‘Darling Berry!’ Darling was one of the smallest boys in the whole school; his hair stood on end and his voice squeaked. He and Berry were both very intelligent; they used to help me with secretarial work for the school magazine, of which I was literary editor.

  During my own first term at the school I had fagged for Ponds, that almost legendary figure whose name I have mentioned already. It was Ponds’ lazy, absent-minded benevolence which had made my life as a new boy tolerable and even enjoyable. From the very first moment, when he had found me in his study, seated dolefully upon a suitcase, and had drawled: ‘Tell me, somebody, who is this curious little creature?’ my admiring gratitude towards him had known no bounds. ‘When I have fags of my own,’ I had often told myself, ‘I shall treat them as Ponds treated me.’

  But, alas, I was not Ponds. I was as little fitted for authority as the majority of my fellow study-holders; less so, indeed, than most. Starting with the friendliest intentions, I soon became peevish, resented fancied symptoms of ‘side,’ puzzled my unfortunate fags by alternations of good humour and ill temper, and generally behaved like any petty office boss. Study-holders in our house, even when they were not prefects, had the power of caning their fags, and we were rather encouraged to exercise our privilege. One day Darling lost my football boots (he played already in the Second house game, while I myself had never risen above the Third); here, according to precedent, was my sufficient opportunity and excuse. There was an ugly, cold-blooded little ceremony, I used the words ‘afraid’ and ‘sorry’ with an hypocrisy worthy of a grown-up man; then I let him wait three hours—a traditional refinement of torture—through prep and supper; finally I sent for him, told him to bend over a chair and gave him the allowed maximum, three strokes. I don’t suppose I hurt him much; next day, of course, the whole thing was elaborately turned into a joke. Nevertheless, a certain confidence had been broken between us, we shared a sense of humiliation like an indecent secret; our relations could never be quite the same again.

  I was very busy that term. In addition to my work on the school magazine, I wrote occasional poems, a beginning of a novel and a paper for the literary society on Chivalry in English Literature. The keynote of the paper was anti-industrialism and hurrah for the bold decorative Middle Ages before the machines, when Life (I quoted) was ‘colour and warmth and light.’ Suitably polished up, this essay might well be acceptable to the editor of any literary-historical magazine in Germany today. I also proposed a motion before the debating society that ‘in the opinion of this House, patriotism is an obstacle to civilization.’ We won our motion, thanks chiefly to a discreet speech by Mr Holmes, who began by agreeing with both sides and went on to lead the House gently round to the reflection that patriotism had been all very well in 1914, but that now we were in 1922 the days of national competition were over, we must work together for co-operation in the future world state. Nearly everybody agreed with him, though there were growls from one or two die-hard members of the staff. Mr Holmes was lecturing to the civics class that term on the causes of the war and had considerably startled most of us by pointing out that the Central Powers were not the only ones to blame. In the meanwhile, we were getting ready for the Cambridge examinations. I was to go up again in December and try, if possible, to convert my exhibition into a sixty-pound scholarship. Mr Holmes thought I might manage this, with luck. In any case, however much I disgraced myself, my exhibition would still hold good.

  Such was the official half of my life; the other, smaller, more exciting half was nour
ished by Chalmers’ letters. He was up at Cambridge now. ‘If school was unmitigated hell, then Cambridge is insidious hell! Cambridge is a monster, a blood-supping blasé monster. It attacks you when you are off your guard, and before you know where you are all poetry and individuality have been drained out of you, and you become a motor-bike or history maniac. Beware of the daemon of history: it is merciless, it casually eats the flesh and heart and leaves the bleaching bones. History, history, hysteria!’ There was a great deal of this sort of thing, mixed up with over-generous criticism of my poems (Mr Holmes once referred to us, in a moment of slight exasperation, as ‘the mutual admiration society’), exclamations against politicians, the team-spirit and ‘religious emporiums,’ and quotations from Baudelaire and Wilfred Owen, who had lately been added to our extremely select pantheon. The letters had neither beginning nor ending; we had abolished both, as being intolerably conventional. Actually, I think, we were still shy—such was the influence of public school convention upon two declared rebels—of using each other’s christian names. It was years before I could call Chalmers ‘Allen’ or he could call me ‘Christopher’ without a trace of self-consciousness. We generally finished with a quotation: ‘Out of the pit that covers me,’ ‘O Life, Life, let me breathe!’ ‘Fail not our feast!’; or simply with the word ‘Amen.’ Chalmers had peculiarly exciting handwriting—sharply pointed, vivid, impatient, with an occasional romantic flourish; his poems gained enormously by being read in manuscript. The mere sight of my address on the envelope would thrill me in anticipation. I sometimes carried the letter about with me for hours, waiting for a quiet moment to enjoy it to the full.

  A couple of days before the end of term, the telegram from Cambridge arrived. I had won an eighty-pound scholarship, my marks were the highest of all the scholars in my future college; I had, in fact, very nearly repeated the epoch-making achievement of Browne himself. We were all frankly amazed. There were more jokes made about Mr Holmes’ influence than ever, and many speculations as to the amount of the cheque which had passed between him and the University authorities.

  On the last day of term, Mr Holmes invited me to lunch at his house. We were both in high spirits yet inclined to be sentimental, for we were fond of each other in our different, peculiar ways, and this was a parting. Now that Chalmers had left, Mr Holmes meant far more to me than any of my school contemporaries. I told him this, with many rather tactless qualifications, for, of course, I was delighted to be leaving and didn’t attempt to conceal my joy. As for Mr Holmes himself, he was experiencing, no doubt, that sense of weariness and depression common to all schoolmasters when they say goodbye to a favourite pupil. It isn’t so much the pupil himself whom they will miss; what is saddening is the thought that now they have got to start all over again, from the beginning, with somebody else. But if Mr Holmes felt this, he didn’t tell me so; he merely smiled his cold friendly smile and plied me with claret till I was mildly drunk and had to rest on his sofa with my feet up. Viewed from this position, the future seemed very bright indeed. I told Mr Holmes that I wanted to be a writer. He agreed, cautiously, that this might be possible. Then, for the first time, I confided to him that I didn’t want to read History at Cambridge at all. I wanted to do English. ‘After all,’ I argued, ‘you yourself admit that I must have got my scholarship chiefly on the English essay. I’m not really an historian at all.’ ‘I k-know you’re not,’ he retorted smiling; and went on to give me a lecture, half-mocking, half-serious, on the value of drudgery, the need for breadth, the necessity of getting inside the minds of people differently constituted from myself: ‘you butterfly, you cobweb, you s-skimmer of other people’s cookery!’ His advice was to take Part One of the Tripos in History, Part Two in English, if I still wished. ‘I wouldn’t have you miss a single one of the home-truths you’ll get from Gorse,’ he added, gleefully, ‘you’ll wriggle and shed several s-skins and be quite a respectable animal at the end of it; whereas, from the English people, you’ll get nothing but a-adulation and d-damnation.’ He paused, pretended to wipe the perspiration from his forehead. ‘But I declaim in vain!’

  He was right. For Chalmers’ voice kept whispering in my ear. I privately decided to write at the earliest possible opportunity and lay my difficulties before the college tutor. I felt perfectly sure I could persuade him to let me have my own way.

  That night, in Hall, before the assembled school, the Headmaster referred to the scholarships in the course of his farewell speech. When my turn came to be applauded, a member of the staff, who had hitherto regarded me with marked disapproval, clapped and smiled across at me with special warmth. And Mr Holmes, who was sitting beside me, bent over and hissed into my ear. ‘You see? N-nothing succeeds like s-success!’

  This, and no phrase from the chapel sermon or my Housemaster’s parting pi-jaw, was the message I carried away with me next day, out into the great treacherous flattering world.

  2

  The college authorities, considerate as always in such matters, had arranged to give me rooms on the same staircase as Chalmers: his were on the ground floor, mine were on the second. I disliked my sitting-room from the first moment I saw it. It was chilly, bare and high; and the walls had been newly papered and painted, a bright unfriendly brown. My few books huddled together, quite lost in the tall built-in bookcase; and I had no photographs or menu-cards to break the long bleak black line of the mantelpiece. The grate didn’t draw properly: the fire was difficult to keep alight and the chimney smoked. There were eight hard, leather-padded brown chairs, none of which I ever used. They had to be ranged along the wall or grouped round the table; making you feel, in either case, that you were surrounded by stiff invisible presences. Altogether, the place was like an old-fashioned dentist’s waiting-room.

  We preferred to sit downstairs in Chalmers’ room, which was low-ceilinged and snug. It seemed to me that Chalmers had strongly impressed his personality upon it; though more by accident than by design, and with a minimum of properties. There were lots of books, of course; the old favourites and the latest acquisitions of his first year—Baudelaire, Poe, Whitman, Owen, Sir Thomas Browne, Donne, Katherine Mansfield, Flaubert, Villon, Tchekhov, Dunbar and the Elizabethans. There were only three pictures: the Dürer engravings—‘Melencolia,’ ‘St Jerome’ and ‘The Knight, Death and the Devil.’ On the mantelpiece were a pair of long-stemmed clay pipes and a little china skull, which Chalmers had seen one day in one of the many curiosity shops of the town. A big inverted lamp-shade, like a half-pumpkin, filled the room with warm red light. Chalmers hadn’t many personal belongings; but, such as they were, they lay scattered about in the most unlikely places. His untidiness made his two rooms seem homely and inhabited. I recognized this, with admiration and occasional irritation: my own tidiness was hopelessly ingrained—in my sitting-room, even the matchbox had its proper position; a position which Chalmers never failed to disturb. With an absent-mindedness which was too consistent to be entirely unintentional, he would knock out his pipe on to my hearth-rug, catch my pained glance (for I hated to check the flow of our conversation), smile guiltily, mumble an apology, and make the feeblest of efforts to sweep up the mess with his hand. In the end, of course, I had to get out of my chair and tidy things up with my little hearth-brush, under Chalmers’ ironical, mock-apologetic eyes. And by the time I had finished, we had both forgotten what it was that we had been talking about.

  If we used my sitting-room at all, it was chiefly to escape from intrusions. Chalmers lived in perpetual terror, half sham, half genuine, of the visits of his college friends. At our very first meeting, he confessed to me, rather shamefacedly, that he had been playing soccer and had actually been given his college colours. This season, he added, he was determined not to play at all. Scarcely were the words out of his mouth, when somebody knocked at the door: it was the college captain, smiling, persuasive, very polite, a list in his hand. (One more striking contrast, I reflected, between public school and university: here was the ex-prefect, accustom
ed to giving orders, having to ask people to play football as a favour!) ‘No,’ I said aloud, ‘I was sorry—I’d really no idea when Chalmers would be back. Yes, I’d tell him, of course.’ When the captain had gone, I went through into the bedroom. Chalmers was hiding under the bed. ‘Christ!’ he gasped, crawling out, ‘that was a near thing! I suppose this means I shall never be able to use these rooms again.’ Finally, of course, he was cornered and smilingly badgered into promising to play; but only in two or three of the most important matches.

  Then there were his first-year boon companions, Queens-bridge, Sargent and Black. Black was ‘the man with the soul,’ whom we had noticed but not spoken to during the scholarship examination, two years before. Black had won a scholarship then, but it didn’t seem likely that he would keep it after the first part of the Tripos—for, like Chalmers himself, he had done badly in the Mays. He was a rowing man, tall and handsome, with pale innocent blue eyes, and wavy brown hair of the kind which girls admire. I rather liked him, but he didn’t like me; finding me affected, highbrow and a bad, because mysterious, influence upon ‘our Al’. When sober, he was very careful not to show this, for fear of offending Chalmers, to whom he was genuinely and touchingly attached. But it came out, in occasional sarcasms, when he was drunk.

  Throughout their first year, these four, surrounded by a group of hearties from the fifteen and the college boat, had spent most of their time together. During the winter, they played poker, dashed round the countryside in Sargent’s car, assisted at all the more violent rags and did some dangerous climbs along the neighbouring roofs. In summer, they had taken shopgirls up the river in punts, returned after midnight without their gowns and scrambled back into college over a private garden wall. Chalmers, whatever he tried to pretend to the contrary, had enjoyed these adventures. His noisy hearty friends accepted him without question; he was old Al, our Al, who played soccer and got drunk and ran after the girls; he was one of the gang. Nobody minded his being a poet—that sort of thing was quite usual up here; even Anderson, the left back, had contributed a sonnet about rose gardens to the College magazine. Literature had its recognized place—as long as you weren’t highbrow about it and could play some game as well. Black and his friends rather made fun of the B. M. colleges which tried to be spartan and tough. Even if Al did know which end of the pen Shakespeare used, he was all right—aren’t you, Al, old boy? And Al grinned at them faintly as they slapped his back. Black’s world was, for Chalmers, a world of escape, like the Pension Dubois at Rouen—escape from shyness, self-consciousness, but not always from ‘The Watcher in Spanish.’