Complete Stories of Eveyln, Page 35

  II

  Thursday, September 25th, 1919. Peacock began well by not turning up for early school so at five past we walked out and went back to our House Rooms and I read Fortitude by Walpole; it is strong meat but rather unnecessary in places. After breakfast O’Malley came greasing up to Tamplin and apologized. Everyone is against him. I maintain he was in the right until he reported him late to Anderson. No possible defence for that—sheer windiness. Peacock deigned to turn up for Double Greek. We mocked him somewhat. He is trying to make us use the new pronunciation; when he said o’ú there was a wail of “ooh” and Tamplin pronounced subjunctive soo-byoongteeway—very witty. Peacock got bored and said he’d report him to Graves but relented. Library was open 5–6 tonight. I went meaning to put in some time on Walter Crane’s Bases of Design but Mercer came up with that weird man in Brent’s called Curtis-Dunne. I envy them having Frank as house-master. He is talking of starting a literary and artistic society for men not in the Sixth. Curtis-Dunne wants to start a political group. Pretty good lift considering this is his second term although he is sixteen and has been at Dartmouth. Mercer gave me a poem to read—very sloppy. Before this there was a House Game. Everyone puffing and blowing after the holidays. Anderson said I shall probably be centre-half in the Under Sixteens—the sweatiest place in the field. I must get into training quickly.

  Friday 26th. Corps day but quite slack. Reorganization. I am in A Company at last. A tick in Boucher’s called Spratt is platoon commander. We ragged him a bit. Wheatley is a section commander! Peacock sent Bankes out of the room in Greek Testament for saying “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest” when put on to translate. Jolly witty. He began to argue. Peacock said, “Must I throw you out by force?” Bankes began to go but muttered “Muscular Christianity.” Peacock: “What did you say?”; “Nothing, sir”; “Get out before I kick you.” Things got a bit duller after that. Uncle George gave Bankes three.

  Saturday 27th. Things very dull in school. Luckily Peacock forgot to set any preparation. Pop. Sci. in last period. Tamplin and Mercer got some of the weights that are so precious they are kept in a glass case and picked up with tweezers, made them red hot on a Bunsen burner and dropped them in cold water. A witty thing to do. House Game—Under Sixteen team against a mixed side. They have put Wykham-Blake centre-half and me in goal; a godless place. Library again. Curtis-Dunne buttonholed me again. He drawled “My father is in parliament but he is a very unenlightened conservative. I of course am a socialist. That’s the reason I chucked the Navy.” I said, “Or did they chuck you?” “The pangs of parting were endured by both sides with mutual stoicism.” He spoke of Frank as “essentially a well-intentioned fellow.” Sunday tomorrow thank God. I may be able to get on with illuminating “The Bells of Heaven.”

  III

  Normally on Sundays there was a choice of service. Matins at a quarter to eight or Communion at quarter past. On the first Sunday of term there was Choral Communion for all at eight o’clock.

  The chapel was huge, bare, and still unfinished, one of the great monuments of the Oxford Movement and the Gothic revival. Like an iceberg it revealed only a small part of its bulk above the surface of the terraced down; below lay a crypt and below that foundations of great depth. The Founder had chosen the site and stubbornly refused to change it so that the original estimates had been exceeded before the upper chapel was begun. Visiting preachers frequently drew a lesson from the disappointments, uncertainties and final achievement of the Founder’s “vision.” Now the whole nave rose triumphantly over the surrounding landscape, immense, clustered shafts supporting the groined roof; at the west it ended abruptly in concrete and timber and corrugated iron, while behind, in a wasteland near the kitchens, where the Corps band practised their bugles in the early morning, lay a nettle-and-bramble-grown ruin, the base of a tower, twice as high as the chapel, which one day was to rise so that on stormy nights, the Founder had decreed, prayers might be sung at its summit for sailors in peril on the sea.

  From outside the windows had a deep, submarine tinge, but from inside they were clear white, and the morning sun streamed in over the altar and the assembled school. The prefect in Charles’s row was Symonds, editor of the Magazine, president of the Debating Society, the leading intellectual. Symonds was in Head’s; he pursued a course of lonely study, seldom taking Evening School, never playing any game except, late in the evenings of the summer term, an occasional single of lawn tennis, appearing rarely even in the Sixth Form, but working in private under Mr. A. A. Carmichael for the Balliol scholarship. Symonds kept a leather-bound copy of the Greek Anthology in his place in chapel and read it throughout the services with a finely negligent air.

  The masters sat in stalls orientated between the columns, the clergy in surplices, laymen in gowns. Some of the masters who taught the Modern Side wore hoods of the newer universities; Major Stebbing, the adjutant of the O.T.C., had no gown at all; Mr. A. A. Carmichael—awfully known at Spierpoint as “A. A.,” the splendid dandy and wit, fine flower of the Oxford Union and the New College Essay Society, the reviewer of works of classical scholarship for the New Statesman, to whom Charles had never yet spoken; whom Charles had never yet heard speak directly, but only at third hand as his mots, in their idiosyncratic modulations, passed from mouth to mouth from the Sixth in sanctuary to the catechumens in the porch; whom Charles worshipped from afar—Mr. Carmichael, from a variety of academic costume, was this morning robed as a baccalaureate of Salamanca. He looked, as he stooped over his desk, like the prosecuting counsel in a cartoon by Daumier.

  Nearly opposite him across the chapel stood Frank Bates; an unbridged gulf of boys separated these rival and contrasted deities, that one the ineffable dweller on cloud-capped Olympus, this the homely clay image, the intimate of hearth and household, the patron of threshing-floor and olive-press. Frank wore only an ermine hood, a B.A.’s gown, and loose, unremarkable clothes, subfusc today, with the Corinthian tie which alternated with the Carthusian, week in, week out. He was a clean, curly, spare fellow; a little wan for he was in constant pain from an injury on the football field which had left him lame and kept him at Spierpoint throughout the war. This pain of his redeemed him from heartiness. In chapel his innocent, blue eyes assumed a puzzled, rather glum expression like those of an old-fashioned child in a room full of grown-ups. Frank was a bishop’s son.

  Behind the masters, out of sight in the side aisles, was a dowdy huddle of matrons and wives.

  The service began with a procession of the choir: “Hail Festal Day,” with Wykham-Blake as the treble cantor. At the rear of the procession came Mr. Peacock, the Chaplain and the Headmaster. A week ago Charles had gone to church in London with Aunt Philippa. He did not as a rule go to church in the holidays, but being in London for the last week Aunt Philippa had said, “There’s nothing much we can do today. Let’s see what entertainment the Church can offer. I’m told there is a very remarkable freak named Father Wimperis.” So, together, they had gone on the top of a bus to a northern suburb where Mr. Wimperis was at the time drawing great congregations. His preaching was not theatrical by Neapolitan standards, Aunt Philippa said afterwards; “However, I enjoyed him hugely. He is irresistibly common.” For twenty minutes Mr. Wimperis alternately fluted and boomed from the pulpit, wrestled with the reading-stand and summoned the country to industrial peace. At the end he performed a little ceremony of his own invention, advancing to the church steps in cope and biretta with what proved to be a large silver salt cellar in his hands. “My people,” he said simply, scattering salt before him, “you are the salt of the earth.”

  “I believe he has something new like that every week,” said Aunt Philippa. “It must be lovely to live in his neighbourhood.”

  Charles’s was not a God-fearing home. Until August 1914 his father had been accustomed to read family prayers every morning; on the outbreak of war he abruptly stopped the practice, explaining, when asked, that there was now nothing left to pray for. When Charles’s mother w
as killed there was a memorial service for her at Boughton, his home village, but Charles’s father did not go with him and Aunt Philippa. “It was all her confounded patriotism,” he said, not to Charles but to Aunt Philippa, who did not repeat the remark until many years later. “She had no business to go off to Serbia like that. Do you think it my duty to marry again?”

  “No,” said Aunt Philippa.

  “Nothing would induce me to—least of all my duty.”

  The service followed its course. As often happened, two small boys fainted and were carried out by house-captains; a third left bleeding at the nose. Mr. Peacock sang the Gospel over-loudly. It was his first public appearance. Symonds looked up from his Greek, frowned and continued reading. Presently it was time for Communion; most of the boys who had been confirmed went up to the chancel rails, Charles with them. Symonds sat back, twisted his long legs into the aisle to allow his row to pass, and remained in his place. Charles took Communion and returned to his row. He had been confirmed the term before, incuriously, without expectation or disappointment. When, later in life, he read accounts of the emotional disturbances caused in other boys by the ceremony he found them unintelligible; to Charles it was one of the rites of adolescence, like being made, when a new boy, to stand on the table and sing. The Chaplain had “prepared” him and had confined his conferences to theology. There had been no probing of his sexual life; he had no sexual life to probe. Instead they had talked of prayer and the sacraments.

  Spierpoint was a product of the Oxford Movement, founded with definite religious aims; in eighty years it had grown more and more to resemble the older Public Schools, but there was still a strong ecclesiastical flavour in the place. Some boys were genuinely devout and their peculiarity was respected; in general profanity was rare and ill-looked-on. Most of the Sixth professed themselves agnostic or atheist.

  The school had been chosen for Charles because, at the age of eleven, he had had a “religious phase” and told his father that he wished to become a priest.

  “Good heavens,” his father said; “or do you mean a parson?”

  “A priest of the Anglican Church,” said Charles precisely.

  “That’s better. I thought you meant a Roman Catholic. Well, a parson’s is not at all a bad life for a man with a little money of his own. They can’t remove you except for flagrant immorality. Your uncle has been trying to get rid of his fellow at Boughton for ten years—a most offensive fellow but perfectly chaste. He won’t budge. It’s a great thing in life to have a place you can’t be removed from—too few of them.”

  But the “phase” had passed and lingered now only in Charles’s love of Gothic architecture and breviaries.

  After Communion Charles sat back in his chair thinking about the secular, indeed slightly anti-clerical, lyric which, already inscribed, he was about to illuminate, while the masters and, after them, the women from the side aisles, went up to the rails.

  The food on Sundays was always appreciably worse than on other days; breakfast invariably consisted of boiled eggs, over-boiled and lukewarm.

  Wheatley said, “How many ties do you suppose A. A.’s got?”

  “I began counting last term,” said Tamplin, “and got to thirty.”

  “Including bows?”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course, he’s jolly rich.”

  “Why doesn’t he keep a car, then?” asked Jorkins.

  The hour after breakfast was normally devoted to letter-writing, but today a railway strike had been called and there were no posts. Moreover, since it was the start of term, there was no Sunday Lesson. The whole morning was therefore free and Charles had extracted permission to spend it in the Drawing School. He collected his materials and was soon happily at work.

  The poem—Ralph Hodgson’s “’Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs . . .”—was one of Frank’s favourites. In the happy days when he had been House Tutor of Head’s, Frank had read poetry aloud on Sunday evenings to any in Head’s who cared to come, which was mostly the lower half of the House. He read “There swimmeth One Who swam e’er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the littlest fish may enter in” and “Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase” and “Under the wide and starry sky” and “What have I done for you, England, my England . . . ?” and many others of the same comfortable kind; but always before the end of the evening someone would say “Please, sir, can we have ‘The Bells of Heaven’?” Now he read only to his own house but the poems, Frank’s pleasant voices, his nightingales, were awake still, warm and bright with remembered firelight.

  Charles did not question whether the poem was not perfectly suited to the compressed thirteenth-century script in which he had written it. His method of writing was first to draw the letters faintly, freehand in pencil; then with a ruler and ruling pen to ink in the uprights firmly in Indian ink until the page consisted of lines of short and long black perpendiculars; then with a mapping pen he joined them with hair strokes and completed their lozenge-shaped terminals. It was a method he had evolved for himself by trial and error. The initial letters of each line were left blank and these, during the last week of the holidays, he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, “Old English” capitals. The T alone remained to do and for this he had selected a model from Shaw’s Alphabets, now open before him on the table. It was a florid fifteenth-century letter which needed considerable ingenuity of adaption, for he had decided to attach to it the decorative tail of the J. He worked happily, entirely absorbed, drawing in pencil, then tensely, with breath held, inking the outline with a mapping pen; then, when it was dry—how often, in his impatience, he had ruined his work by attempting this too soon—rubbing away the pencil lines. Finally he got out his watercolours and his red sable brushes. At heart he knew he was going too fast—a monk would take a week over a single letter—but he worked with intensity and in less than two hours the initial with its pendant, convoluted border was finished. Then, as he put away his brushes, the exhilaration left him. It was no good; it was botched; the ink outline varied in thickness, the curves seemed to feel their way cautiously where they should have been bold; in places the colour overran the line and everywhere in contrast to the opaque lithographic ink it was watery and transparent. It was no good.

  Despondently Charles shut his drawing book and put his things together. Outside the Drawing School, steps led down to the Upper Quad past the doors of Brent’s House—Frank’s. Here he met Mercer.

  “Hullo, been painting?”

  “Yes, if you can call it that.”

  “Let me see.”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “It’s absolutely beastly. I hate it, I tell you. I’d have torn it up if I wasn’t going to keep it as a humiliation to look at in case I ever begin to feel I know anything about art.”

  “You’re always dissatisfied, Ryder. It’s the mark of a true artist, I suppose.”

  “If I was an artist I shouldn’t do things I’d be dissatisfied with. Here, look at it, if you must.”

  Mercer gazed at the open page. “What don’t you like about it?”

  “The whole thing’s nauseating.”

  “I suppose it is a bit ornate.”

  “There, my dear Mercer, with your usual unerring discernment you have hit upon the one quality that is at all tolerable.”

  “Oh, sorry. Anyway, I think the whole thing absolutely first-class.”

  “Do you, Mercer. I’m greatly encouraged.”

  “You know you’re a frightfully difficult man. I don’t know why I like you.”

  “I know why I like you. Because you are so extremely easy.”

  “Coming to the library?”

  “I suppose so.”

  When the library was open a prefect sat there entering in a ledger the books which boys took out. Charles as usual made his way to the case where the Art books were kept but before he had time to settle down, as he liked
to do, he was accosted by Curtis-Dunne, the old new boy of last term in Brent’s. “Don’t you think it scandalous,” he said, “that on one of the few days of the week when we have the chance to use the library, we should have to kick our heels waiting until some semi-literate prefect chooses to turn up and take us in? I’ve taken the matter up with the good Frank.”

  “Oh, and what did he say to that?”

  “We’re trying to work out a scheme by which library privileges can be extended to those who seriously want them, people like you and me and I suppose the good Mercer.”

  “I forget for the moment what form you are in.”

  “Modern Upper. Please don’t think from that I am a scientist. It’s simply that in the Navy we had to drop Classics. My interests are entirely literary and political. And of course hedonistic.”

  “Oh.”

  “Hedonistic above all. By the way, I’ve been looking through the political and economic section. It’s very quaintly chosen, with glaring lacunae. I’ve just filled three pages in the Suggestions Book. I thought perhaps you’d care to append your signature.”

  “No thanks. It’s not usual for people without library privileges to write in the Suggestions Book. Besides, I’ve no interest in economics.”

  “I’ve also written a suggestion about extending the library privileges. Frank needs something to work on, that he can put before the committee.”

  He brought the book to the Art bay; Charles read “That since seniority is no indication of literary taste the system of library privileges be revised to provide facilities for those genuinely desirous of using them to advantage.”

  “Neatly put, I think,” said Curtis-Dunne.

  “You’ll be thought frightfully above yourself, writing this.”

  “It is already generally recognized that I am above myself, but I want other signatures.”

  Charles hesitated. To gain time he said, “I say, what on earth have you got on your feet? Aren’t those house shoes?”