Incredibly the Push were blind to their amazing superficiality. Even had they suffered from an inclination to be serious, life came so easily and so rapidly that it would have been impossible to do anything but play with it. So they trifled with wisdom and trifled rightly. For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream. Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. They talked of great things and small, of God and Woman and sometimes of Man, of futures and careers, of the dons, of the college, of the varsity teams, of books and plays and poets, of the coldness of the pretty girl in this shop and of the wantonness of the plain girl in that.
They lived with an excellent method. In the mornings they lay in bed, thought about breakfast, ate breakfast, and read the papers. In the junior common-room there were all the dailies and on Wednesdays there werePunch,The Tatler,The Sketch, andThe Bystander, on Saturdays the weekly reviews. They were catholic in the reading, but, if the supply happened to give out, they could always consider what to do in the afternoon. By that time it was one o'clock and they lunched frugally and together. In the afternoon they took their various amusements. Perhaps Lawrence and Martin played rugger, while Chard and Davenant strolled round Addison Walk. Rendell insisted on playing hockey, insisted in the face of opposition.
"You can't play hockey," said Martin. "It's no game for a gentleman."
"It's quite a good game," Rendell apologised.
"It may be all right for internationals who dart about and toss the ball in the air and catch it on the end of their sticks, but it's no game for incapables like you."
"I'm in the team anyhow. And you, by the way, are winning renown as the worst wing three-quarter in Oxford."
"That is probably true," Martin admitted. "But it doesn't destroy my contention that hockey is a scrappy, uncomfortable business and only good enough for men who can't get into any other teams."
"You're a stark old reactionary," retorted Rendell. "Hockey is the game of the future. There'll be a 'full Blue' for it in a year or two. And don't make the obvious remark."
Martin didn't. But he continued to jeer when Rendell went off in the rain and came back with bruised shins and perhaps a black eye. This only encouraged Rendell to take the game very seriously, to turn out always, and to run like a hare down his wing, whereas Martin and Lawrence treated this rugger team with disdain and only played when it pleased them. The secretary, being hard up for players, could not drop them altogether, for even Martin was better than his substitute. In the summer Rendell played cricket as seriously as he had played his hockey, so that he just gained a place in the college eleven. Martin played sometimes for the tennis six and the other three fled, when it was warm enough and at first when it was not—for such is the way of freshers—to navigate the Cherwell in the communal punt.
In the evenings they dined out as often as their college would let them and went to meetings of clubs or, on the rare occasions when there was a play worth seeing, to the theatre. Work they neglected, thoroughly and with a good heart. Chard and Davenant, who were to take modern history, both failed in Pass Mods in March, but passed in the summer after a fortnight's reading. The other three had resolved that Honour Mods could easily be squared in a long vac and two terms: they did not realise that a year of idleness (or nearly two years, for none of them had worked since gaining their scholarships) creates a habit of mind which cannot easily be shaken off. Two stiff terms are easier to contemplate than to achieve. Martin, indeed, had his uncle's blessing, for John Berrisford had told him that the first year was meant to broaden one's point of view: it struck him as a joyous process, this broadening of one's point of view.
His tutor, Reggie Petworth, he did not like. Petworth turned out to be a "neo-cardiac" of the first water: even then he hadn't the decency to be whole-hearted in his heartiness and wavered between complete allegiance with Hodges and the college 'right' and a feeble attempt to conciliate the 'left' as represented by Lawrence and Martin. Petworth had come from Balliol with the Hertford, the Ireland, and a Philosophy of Fun. It was Fun to write jolly compositions and Fun to set proses out of George Meredith which bore no relation to classical thought or idiom and couldn't conceivably be translated into reasonable Latin or Greek. It was Fun to be a High Churchman, Fun to talk about priests and masses, Fun to date your letters by feasts of the Church, Fun to be a Liberal and believe in the people. Fun to have bad cigarettes sent from a remote Oriental town because its monarch was a Balliol man, Fun to collect things without sense or purpose, Fun, in fact, to pretend to be a child.
"One doesn't mind Davenant pretending to be decadent now and then," said Martin to Lawrence, "because decadence always depends on posing for its real point. A man isn't a decadent unless he knows he's a decadent and plays up to it. But childhood is rather different, and I don't see why blighters like Reggie should try and ape it."
"Just the Balliol touch," said Lawrence.
Martin was supposed to show up two compositions a week to Reggie Petworth and to do occasional translation papers. He attended with some regularity to make up for his complete absence from lectures. Petworth exhorted him mildly to make more strenuous efforts and told him what Fun Demosthenes could be if one read the private speeches, about mining rights and water-courses and assaults. Whereupon Martin was coldly polite and retired to renew his conversations about the world at large, while Petworth would find a 'jolly' man and walk out to eat lunch at Beckley, saying 'What Fun!' if he saw a pig with pleasant markings.
To Martin, as he lazily reclined one September morning in the black woods behind The Steading, the past was a vision of undimmed radiance. Oxford had threatened but it had not fulfilled: rather it had grudged him nothing of its plenty. It had given him friends (miraculously the Push had not quarrelled) and views and a year of fine living. He knew now how tainted by the poison of exams had been his first impressions of that grey and gracious city, he knew that it was not just a Midland town with a liability to fogs and floods. Also he knew that his uncle had been wrong when he said that the place didn't matter and only the institution counted. For he had even learned to love the lambent tongues of mist that crept stealthily from the river to the walls of Corpus and Merton and drifted over roofs and towers to the noise and splendour of the High. The myriad lights of rooms piled on rooms flashing out into a blue dusk of winter, the reds and greys of Holywell, the clatter of the Corn and the bells that told unfailingly the hours of the night were now in his memory the blended symbols of a growing intimacy. He had found out Cumnor Hurst and Besselsleigh, and the sweep of the downs clear-cut against the sky, and the old towns to the West, Burford and Fairford and all the Chippings of the Wolds. But clearest of all in his memory were the canoe voyages made by Rendell and Lawrence and himself at the close of the summer term. Then, while a horde of wealthy trippers came to Oxford to dance and flirt and hold sumptuous revel, they pierced every dim recess of the upper river and probed the secrets of the Evenlode. They had bathed in the morning and in the afternoon and again by moonlight, running in wild nakedness over strewn hay to recover warmth. At Bablock Hythe they had eaten cold ducks and drunk cider in gallons: they had lain for hours on the Long Leas gazing into an infinite dome of stars and waiting for the idle nightingale. And Lawrence had nearly murdered Rendell for quoting Matthew Arnold.
Martin was eager to be back, despite the prospect of two stiff terms. And when he was back once more in Oxford, no longer the leaf-clad city of pleasant waters but grey and dripping with the autumn mists, he found that both he himself and his friends had far too much to say. They were all in new and more desirable rooms and Martin was free from the domination of Galer. He had chosen to dwell high up in the back quad, where the windows were large and the rooms airy, and lately he had revised his pictures. This term he purchased some quaintly luminous and misty landscapes which were the fruit either of startling genius or blank incompetence. As to which was the case there was great argument. Rendell, being senior scholar of his year, had been able to claim the famous rooms of the college, oak-panelled and majestically dark. For Art he relied upon Rembrandt and Dürer: but then Rendell never risked anything.
Undoubtedly they had all a great deal to recount, for sixteen weeks of vacation could hardly fail to bring new friends and new experience, new books and new ideas. And the Push knew that there is no satisfaction in mere discovery: it is the telling of a tale that makes for pleasure. So night after night Martin neglected to settle down after dinner, began to tell tales, and concluded, somewhere about twelve, that it was too late to begin now. Then they would play a rubber of sixpenny auction just to make them sleepy and, playing till three or four, would so succeed in their ambition that they could not breakfast till eleven. Only Rendell refused to be tempted and went dutifully to his books.
Before long Martin quarrelled with Reggie Petworth, sulked foolishly, despaired of the term, and began to rely on the winter vacation and the subsequent six weeks of term to grapple with the problem of Mods. He spent a miserable Christmas at The Steading and came to the conclusion on New Year's Eve that he had forgotten nearly every word of Greek and Latin that he had ever known. He did not look forward to the term, and on January the fifteenth he went to Oxford as a lamb to the slaughter.
It was a term of infinite depression. The early months of the year, everywhere unkind, are singularly uncharitable to Oxford: the glamour of autumn had departed and winter has no majesty in muddy streets. The days were yellow with a sticky warmth that brought exhaustion and despair. Martin, passing from book to book, felt always, at whatever time of day, as though he had eaten too much lunch and would die if he didn't soon have tea: it was that kind of weather. He gave up football because it made him sleep after tea: and then, being without exercise or diversion, yawned all morning and read garbage after lunch. Rendell had his work well in hand and was, men said, sure to get a first. Lawrence had manfully abandoned hope and sought consolation in beer and bridge. Martin, foolishly but characteristically, took the middle path. He had neither the energy to work nor the courage to be idle, but sat mournfully with his books, gazing blankly at the pages and wondering why it was all so new to him. Then he would consult recent papers, and his heart would sink yet lower as he realised his amazing ignorance.
As the weeks slipped away he took to learning up lists of hard words and legal technicalities. He became a master of the Virgilian vegetable and the Demosthenic demurrer, and though he knew the Latin for burrs and calthrops and succory and bogwort, he would have been quite incapable of distinguishing those herbs from one another. Thus do we study the poets and orators. But it was distressing work.
And then he became aware of Pink Roses. He noticed her because of her ubiquity and partly, perhaps, because she was always alone: he noticed her in the Broad, in the High, at a football match in the parks, once in the cinema. She was not beautiful, not even pretty: otherwise she need scarcely have remained alone in a community so rapacious. Usually she wore a coat and skirt of dark blue and a little black hat with pink roses. Beneath her hat Martin had observed light fluffy hair done witchingly about her ears and he had been able to notice that she had a pleasing smile and the tiniest of dimples. But her features, too heavy to be piquant, were not strong enough to be striking.
He pointed her out one day to Lawrence and demanded his opinion.
"Oh, that's your Pink Roses," he said critically. "Pretty poor stuff."
"She may be all right," answered Martin meekly.
"She walks all right, but she has got a face like a milk pudding."
Martin did not attempt to argue against this higher criticism. Lawrence, he thought, was an old dear but he certainly lacked perception. There was something about Pink Roses.
And then one evening, when he was turning into a main street, he walked right into her. He smiled vaguely and apologised, but she had hurried past him and did not hear. He turned and watched her. She stopped outside the cinema and studied the programme: eventually she went in. Martin had meant to do an hour's work before dinner and began walking back to college. Soon he stopped again and stood vaguely on the pavement, gazing at the passing crowd. At last resolvedly he resumed his journey to the college and the poets. Five minutes later he was passing a shilling through the grille of the cinema ticket office. It seemed an age before a film ended and the light went up. Then he saw the Pink Roses flowering alone in the sixpenny seats. As soon as the pictures began he would go in her direction. But when the time came he felt self-conscious and afraid. 'Ridiculous ass,' he said to himself. "You desert Lucretius for Pink Roses and now you don't even gather the rose-buds." And then again: 'Who is the silly girl—after all? Here am I, a scholar of a college, deserting Lucretius for that funny little person! It's too childish.' So he rose to go out and walked instead to the sixpenny seats.
The girl looked round to see who was coming next to her.
"Hullo!" whispered Martin as though surprised. "Didn't I nearly knock you over in the street just now?"
"Someone ran into me," she answered. "I didn't notice who it was."
"I think it was me. I'm so sorry."
"Oh, it didn't matter, thank you."
She said it very nicely and Martin was encouraged to go on. It was rather difficult and he wished he was fortified by a sound dinner.
"You come here a good lot?" he said at last.
"Yes. Nearly every time the pictures change."
"Don't you get bored?"
"It's better than doing nothing."
"But the pictures are so silly as a rule."
"Oh, I like the pictures. 'Sixty Years a Queen'—that was lovely. The girl that did Queen Victoria was just sweet."
To his own surprise Martin did not object to her taste: he would have loathed any other admirer of "Sixty Years a Queen."
"Do you know many people here?" he asked.
"I know some girls I was at school with."
"No men?"
"Not many. I know Mr Carter; Brasenose, isn't he? Do you know him?"
"Only by sight. He's going to be chucked out of the varsity boat."
"Is he? I'm so sorry. He's awfully nice."
"Do you know him well?"
"Only a little. I met him in here. He asked me to have tea in his rooms in Beaumont Street, but of course I couldn't."
So she had ideas about propriety. There was a silence.
"Do you always live in Oxford?" asked Martin.
"We live out at Botley."
"Pretty deadly spot, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's something awful. I want to go to London only my family won't let me go into business. I'm awfully bored."
"So am I."
"Why are you bored?"
"I've got an exam coming on."
"Oh, you poor thing! I could never do exams. I think they're horrid. I do hope you'll get on all right!"
"Thanks very much!" It pleased Martin to have her sympathy.
They chattered on. Her name was May Williams and she seemed to be very, very tired of Botley and her own company. Before Martin went away to dinner he asked her to meet him at the same time the next evening.
"It's Wednesday," he said. "So you'll get your new pictures. I think it's nicer at this time: there's such a crush in here after dinner."
May agreed with evident pleasure and Martin went back to dinner rejoicing in his courage and his first steps to adventure. He had been right: there was something about Pink Roses, indefinable perhaps, but plainly something. She wasn't just one of the Oxford girls.
So they met again and on Saturday night they drove out in a taxi to Abingdon and dined in rather squalid pomp. Henceforward they saw much of one another and had more drives and dinners and were happy: for both had won a release.
They did not at all know what they wanted, but both knew quite plainly from what they wanted to escape. Martin wanted to throw off for a few hours the burden of his work, which was neither mere routine, like copying addresses, nor definite creation, like the making of a poem or a good mashie shot. This minute preparation of books and this learning by rote of variant readings and emendations seemed so appalling just because they defied both a mechanical application and a vivid interest. And May wanted to escape from the frigid respectability of a red-brick villa at Botley, where she lived with her father, a retired Oxford tradesman: she wanted to escape from an existence which contained nothing but meals, a bicycle,The Daily Mirror, and walks with the girl next door. So she invented an old school friend who had jolly evenings in Walton Street. Her father had the virtue of credulity and allowed her to go her own way, and Martin's.
So much they knew and nothing more. Martin never discovered whether he actually felt any enthusiasm for May as a real person abstracted from Mods and his own despair and the black mass of circumstance: he didn't think about it, but just took her as she was. There were times when she amused him and gave him pleasure, and times when he thought that the satisfaction of her kisses was as nothing to the boredom of her conversation. Yet, because he was young and simple and far more conscientious than he would have cared to admit to the advanced young men of the Push, he was not prepared to confess to himself that she was just an amusement. The Martin who talked so airily in Lawrence's rooms about women and the world was an innocent impostor: as a matter of fact the Push, also conscious and a little ashamed of their own excessive virtue, were not taken in by his magniloquence. May was equally ignorant about her own attitude and intentions. She was not at all a fast or desperate young woman: an impartial critic might even have noticed in her a leaden morality. But her conscience did not forbid the unaccustomed thrill of a lover's attendance and the subsequent lie of convenience. No one had ever encouraged her to think things out or to formulate her purposes. Consequently she drifted placidly, and if conscience whispered or Martin suggested another evening's pleasure, it was too much trouble to listen to the one or refuse the other.
Mods were to begin on a Thursday. On the preceding Saturday Martin was going down to the Berrisfords to seek fresh air and to forget the existence of Demosthenes. He had wanted to stay and cram to the end, but ultimately he had yielded to Petworth's advice and decided to go. At eleven o'clock on the Friday night he was wandering back alone through Osney. He had walked with May along the Eynsham Road: it had been a perfect night with the moon hanging over Wytham Woods like a silver slit in a cloth of blackest fabric. But May didn't bother about the moon, and they had gone to a deserted barn where they had met before, a good enough place for lovers in the mood but otherwise draughty and forlorn. They had not quarrelled: neither had alluded to the possibility of such a thing. But Martin had thought May dull and May had thought Martin cold. The evening had not been a success, and the fact that it had not been a confessed failure made it all the worse, for Martin had arranged to see her again on Wednesday night before his exam.
Now, as he tramped slowly home, he fell into a great anger and despair. That night at least he might have devoted to learning the long lists of words which he had so laboriously compiled. But he hadn't: he had dallied in an outhouse with a girl who didn't think, didn't know, didn't care, a girl whose only attraction lay in her wistful eyes and an engaging atmosphere of loneliness. To have to philander in back roads and crumbling sheds—how revolting it all was when he looked at it in cold blood. To have to—well, perhaps he hadn't to, but life, with its misery of Mods, wasn't much fun if he didn't. This was the only escape. Martin wanted to meet women openly, if he had to meet them, and to face things clearly and honestly. But he couldn't do so because of morality, official morality with its peeping proctors and furtive pettiness. How Lawrence and he had thrashed it all out! It seemed that men should have honourable and reasonable relations with women, and yet, because of decency, it came to this. Wherever man met woman, there also must be mean slinking and shame-faced meeting, taxis and back lanes and a sordid round of evasion. Earlier in the term the sheer joy of release had blinded him to the squalor of it. Now, when enchantment had been staled by habit, his fastidiousness returned. It wasn't only that Pink Roses were beginning to fade: he was beginning to realise that pleasure demands its pleasance and Pink Roses an adequate rose-bed.
And then came four days of Devonshire, with clear winds from the sea such as never breathed strength and spirit into Oxford's mellow torpor: four days too of The Steading's restful beauty, of real hills and whispering coverts. And there were two days of golf on a distant course, a season of great hitting with driver and brassie, fierce efforts to make "fours" of fives, with rare successes and frequent disaster. In the evenings John Berrisford was more wonderful than ever.
Nor was fresh company wanting. Margaret had a friend staying with her, a Miss Freda Neilson. At first Martin thought her insignificant, but he soon saw that her insignificance was intensely significant. She wasn't just a small and timid person with nothing to be said for or against her. In her quick-glancing eyes of deepest brown lurked courage and speculation, and there was a charming ease about her clothes and the swift movements of her body. She certainly was not a frowsy intellectual, and the fact that Margaret had brought her down for inspection was a guarantee that she wasn't a stupid little thing.
Martin had talked a little to her on Saturday night: after breakfast on Sunday he noticed her on a seat in the garden enjoying the strong sunshine. He went towards her and looked over her shoulder. She was reading one of Mr Berrisford's more private French works. Careless of Margaret to leave it about!
"On Sunday, too!" said Martin.
"Just to counteract the very English breakfast," she laughed. "I don't think I ever ate so much in my life since I came here."
"My uncle's sound about breakfast. Those were true sausages."
"I suppose so. I don't think I'm very good at sausages. I'm afraid I hanker after rolls and fruit and things."
"Then you're all wrong. You've no case at all."
"And who gave you permission to lay down the law about taste?"
"My own common-sense. How can two people talk unless someone starts by dogmatising? Supposing I started off, 'Sausages may possibly, if they are good ones and of sound pork richly fried, seem nice to some people, the world being as it is,' ... we wouldn't get far, would we?"
"And who said I wanted conversation?"
"I ventured to deduce it from the fact that you looked round when you thought I wasn't looking."
"I never did."
"Didn't you? Then I made a bad shot. I'm sorry!"
Martin wasn't very happy about this rather heavy beginning. The conversation was floundering hopelessly. Freda, seeing this, took him firmly in hand.
"Well," she said, closing the sinister work of decadence, "as you've come, you'd better stay and enjoy the sunshine and take an interest in me."
"Will you take one in me?"
"Oh yes! Fair play. Don't let's talk stilted rubbish any more: it's such an effort. Now then, I'll begin. What about Oxford and Mods?"
So he told her the weary tale. She was sympathetic in a rather challenging, offensive way, which he enjoyed.
"And now you?" he said.
"Oh, I'm just an office girl. I ought to readThe MirrorandThe London Mail, but I don't. You know Margaret was doing some work for the Women's Trade Union Movement: that's how she ran into me. I do the typing in the office where she works. We had a rush of work owing to the strikes in Lancashire and my silly health collapsed. She brought me down here. The Berrisfords have been awfully good to me."
"Do you like being in the office?" asked Martin.
"It might be worse, because the letters I have to type are sometimes about something mildly interesting. Just fancy having to do business letters all day. But the society is so short of funds that they work me hard and don't overpay me."
"I always knew that sweating began with the charity-mongers. But I thought your people might be a bit better."
"I suppose I oughtn't to grumble. Shouldn't I pay a small sacrifice to the great cause of Efficiency?"
"I hate Collectivism. I mean the Efficiency type."
"So young, my lord, and a Syndicalist?"
"In parts. Anyhow, they might treat you better." Martin spoke with conviction.
"It's nice of you to be worried, but you needn't. I used to be a school-ma'am and teach English literature to girls with pigtails and secret societies to giggle about. Can't you imagine me? We always didAs You Like ItorThe Tempest. That was just hell. I'd much sooner pinch and scrape in London than live in a school with bells and prayers and the younger members of my own sex. It was quite a good post and everyone said I ought to have stayed on. But I just couldn't. So now I have only myself to blame if I'm unhappy."
"I think it was very plucky of you," was all Martin could think of.
"Oh, I'm safe enough. I don't starve, you know. But there's not much over for books."
"It must be rotten!"
There was a silence.
"Do the Berrisfords go to church?" Freda asked suddenly. "I only came on Tuesday."
"No, rather not."
"Thank God!"
"Then you aren't one of the faithful?"
"No. Taking the girls to church had a bad effect on my temper. Besides, after all——"
"Well?"
"I'm keen on philosophy. Are you?"
"I'm going to be when I begin Greats."
"Don't you like it now?"
"In a crude sort of way. We're always talking about God at Oxford."
"That must be splendid. I have to do it with myself, but I don't get any further."
"Than what?"
"Than a tremendous conviction that there can't be one."
"There isn't."
"You've settled it?"
"Long ago."
"I suppose," said Freda, "that people laugh at you, like they do at me. I don't care. Margaret talks about the Unknowable and says I'm presumptuous. I hate the Unknowable: it seems so cowardly, somehow."
"You're quite right," decided Martin. "The Unknowable is the limit."
"But we mustn't agree about everything," Freda put in: "otherwise it will be frightfully dull."
"Well, let's talk about Art," he suggested. "We're bound to quarrel then."
And they did. It was astonishing how soon lunchtime arrived.
Later on they talked about everything in the world. Martin knew that he had found what he wanted, a woman with an undergraduate's mind. In a way it was like talking to one of the Push, but yet there was all the difference in the world. Why there should be that difference he couldn't tell. But there it undeniably was. To meet men who could argue was good: to meet a woman who said the same sort of things was more than good. Freda walked with him on the moor on Tuesday, and he had the chance of helping her over bogs and chasms. On that evening she accepted a billiard lesson at his hands. Of these opportunities he made the most. May Williams had at least had an educational value.
These four days were magically sundered from the rest of life: he had succeeded, to his own great surprise, in forgetting Oxford altogether. But the day of reckoning was at hand, and when Martin settled down in the train on Wednesday he fell at once from the heights to the depths. To begin with, he was going back to Mods. Before the tumult of his mind flashed visions of texts marked with blue lines, texts which he had omitted to look up. He wondered whether he really knew about Ulysses' abominable boat and whether he remembered which words in the Greek meant dowels and trenails. And he was going back to Pink Roses. The squalor of it! To-night he was to meet her and slink away somewhere. He couldn't, he simply couldn't! He had learned, rather he thought he had learned, what a conversation with a woman ought to be. There could be no more whisperings with May. On reaching Oxford Martin sent a telegram: he was unavoidably prevented from seeing her. He felt that he ought to be angry with himself because it didn't hurt him to treat her like this: but his conscience failed to rise to the situation. Quite plainly he had done with May.
Mods in the actual presence afforded him eight days of consummate torture. It was all right for Rendell, who knew his work thoroughly, and Lawrence, who didn't know it at all. They could view their papers without concern, the one scribbling diligently, the other yawning complacently, guessing words, and tossing up with a penny when there seemed to be two equally probable meanings to a passage for construe. But for Martin every prepared paper was a thing of reminiscence and suggestion. He knew just enough to appreciate his own ignorance: as he stared at the passages on which he had to comment he recognised them with maddening vagueness as a man who cannot put a name to a face he knows. Hauntingly they seemed to cry out at him: "You saw me last January, but you don't know what the devil I'm about." While Rendell used his knowledge and Lawrence his imagination, Martin sweated and racked his memory and got everything half right. His nerve went and he began, he thought, to make a mess of his composition. Afterwards he was left with a blur of sensations and images which included a large clock and a smiling invigilator, aching hands and nights of relentless preparation.
When it was all over he hurried down to Devonshire, leaving Lawrence to forty-eight hours of continuous intoxication. Freda would still be there. But, to his fury, he discovered that she had gone to Paris with Margaret. He sulked obviously, and hated the whole world: life and letters had tended to leave his nerves raw and anything stung him. Finally he went to join Rendell and Lawrence in Belgium, and there, with Memling and Bock and conversation, he forgot his woes. The exam results came to them at Rochefort, rich in grottoes, that notable town of the Ardennes. Rendell had taken a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third. Martin had entertained fears of a third and Lawrence of a fourth, so they agreed that things have been worse.
"Anyhow," said Martin, as they went in search of tea andgateaux, "that's an end of those infernal classics." Which was both an error on his part—for in Greats, as he later on discovered, one deals mainly with translation—and a commentary on the plain man's attitude to the poets and orators by the time that he has been taught all about them.
The summer term was a joyous interlude. Martin and Lawrence had nothing to do but play tennis or regard the world from a punt, and an early summer encouraged these methods of killing time. Rendell was cajoled by Petworth into entering for the Hertford scholarship, which involved some attention to the Latin language. While Martin read novels Rendell was perusing some of the worst poetry that the world has ever produced, it being the habit of the examiners to select passages from the frigid obscurity of Silver Latin.
"There's your classical education," shouted Lawrence contemptuously. "Silius Italicus and drivel about Etna and its siphons."
Rendell had to admit that, taken as a whole, Latin literature made a poor show.
"There's Lucretius and Catullus," he said.
"They're all right," said Lawrence. "But who else is there? Virgil, the Victorian before his time. The cave scene, so refined and all that. Better than old Arthur from the barge. Virgil the most blatant pirate and lifter of literary goods that ever made a name. Virgil who couldn't even translate the originals right and showed himself to be a fool as well as a knave. If we're going to have thieves, let's have them competent. Virgil! Ugh!"
Lawrence always spoke like this about Virgil: the subject gave him eloquence, and the others had long ago ceased to argue with him on this theme. To withstand his river of rhetoric was like trying to make a match-box float up-stream.
"No, my lad," he continued, "you are making a distinct fool of yourself by believing Mr Petworth's flattery. Not only is Latin literature rot, but that rot will be more efficiently done by those intolerable creatures from Balliol, who think of nothing else but these pots. You're wasting valuable time, failing to improve your execrable tennis, and demeaning yourself into the bargain. I wouldn't compete with those swine."
Of course Rendell took no notice and continued to read the more obscure Romans. But Lawrence was right; he did himself no good.
In June Martin went down to Devonshire. Only his uncle and aunt were at home: Margaret was abroad and Robert was working in chambers in town. Martin had much time for recalling the past and considering the future. He saw now that a day of reckoning was at hand. For two years, with the exception of a few weeks, he had taken life very, very easily, and it was inevitable that he should begin to take it with corresponding seriousness. He would have to settle down: his second in Mods had been a fluky affair, based rather on previous knowledge than on any real work done at Oxford. "Greats" would depend on genuine reading, and after Greats the Civil—and his livelihood. Probably he would have to go to India: how unthinkable it all was! Martin thought of India as a very hot place, where you either died before you got your pension or sat in clubs drinking whisky and soda with bullet-headed soldiers who didn't know the difference between Chopin and Cézanne, didn't know probably that such people had been. The future became hatefully plain. Either he would fail for the Civil and go to slave dismally at Wren's or else he would pass and go out to Colonels or to death. He wanted none of these things: he wanted books and friends and work in London, just enough work to neglect. It was scarcely possible for him to get a job at home and he hadn't money enough for the Bar. In fact he hadn't a penny, and he knew that his uncle couldn't help him: as it was, Mr Berrisford had been more than generous.
It was a bad prospect. To make matters worse, he set out to read Herodotus. He had been told that Herodotus was the jolliest man on earth (of course by Petworth) and he expected a treat. He found two immense volumes about nothing in particular, which contained a description of the world, occasionally amusing but more often fruitful only of hard words. What it all had to do with the Greek states and why the father of history had chosen to write almost anything but history, and that in the most muddled way possible, he found it hard to discover. And then he tried the ethics of Aristotle: he penetrated as far as Book V. and then gave way. For two whole days he yawned and swore alternately. There was not even anyone to talk to.
One night he decided to put the case to his uncle. He approached it in a rather tentative way after dinner as they sat smoking.
"Don't you ever get tired of being the country gentleman?" he asked.
"Frequently," said John Berrisford.
"Does it pass off, or what do you do about it?"
"Sometimes I go up to town to a company meeting and sometimes I bravely defy boredom by catching, or failing to catch, trout."
"And it works?"
"Tolerably. But why this anxiety about country life?"
"It just occurred to me."
After a silence, John Berrisford said to Martin:
"You've got a lit of depression and you want to meet men and talk about Art or the good life or women. It's quite right and natural that you should. Where have all your set vanished to?"
"Two or three have gone to Paris."
"Well, go thou and do likewise."
Martin paused. "I'm afraid I can't afford it. I've only got twelve pounds to keep me going till October. And I've got some bills as it is."
"I'll give you twenty-five. Go and talk your head off. Do some work too."
"It's frightfully good of you. They were going to work. They're living very cheaply in rooms somewhere: later on, when it's too hot, they're going into Brittany."
"Well, I don't know how long the money will last, but we'll expect you when we see you."
"Thanks awfully!"
"Now let's walk in the garden."
It was a perfect midsummer evening. Away to the west the sky was still red with the sunset and higher up above them the changing hues of opal merged into a lustrous blue which again was turned to steel in the summit of the vault. To the east shapely stems of firs rose to a black bulk of branches, spread out against the sky like tails of giant peacocks. And behind them was the splendid body of the moor with its great bosom of heather towering into nipples of stone. The night, which had stolen away colour and left only light and shade, had given strength and meaning to every line and curve and silhouette. They walked over soft, clinging grass to a paddock dotted with hen-coops, where the tiny pheasants were wont to squeak and scuttle. The black line of a distant bank twinkled with the tails of startled rabbits and an owl clattered heavily through leafy boughs. Then followed a silence, vivid and unforgettable, but soon to be broken by the shrill note of a bat that came and went with magic swerve and speed.
"Well," said John Berrisford, after lighting a fresh cigar, "isn't this rather convincing?"
"About the country, you mean?"
"Yes. On such a night do you thirst for Paris and café chatter with a drink-sodden Futurist?"
"It's too clear," answered Martin, looking round. "Perhaps to-morrow night it will be pouring, and then even you may have a hankering after the roar of traffic and the fine smell of a city."
"My dear Martin, you're impossible. You can't have everything your own way. If you intend to worship at one shrine you've got to keep it up for a bit and give the deity a chance of getting hold of you."
"And what if you don't believe in worshipping deities?"
"Then you'll be very unhappy."
"But you don't worship and you profess to be happy?"
"Don't I worship?"
"It's the first I've heard of it."
"How do you suppose I would be here now if I didn't worship the place? I'm a positive mystic."
"And the mystery?"
"The blessed mystery of Ham and Eggs."
"It sounds very fleshly. Tell me about it."
"Fleshly! It's the most spiritual thing on earth: in fact it's the cardinal point in the country gentleman's faith. But I'd better explain it all from the beginning. Just after I'd left Oxford your grandfather died and left me this estate. I was young and rebellious, as every young man should be, and I can tell you I didn't enjoy the prospect of settling down as a squire. Like Herrick, I preferred London to 'that dull Devonshire.' I wanted to hang about town, to join the devotees of Morris, to be a genius, a writer of brilliant plays and beautiful books, to be a lover of woman and to have breakfast after lunch. So I let this place to a tenant and fooled round."
"But I don't want to fool round. I want reasonable work."
"That's what they all say. It's what I said. But I never did any work."
"And you liked it?"
"On the whole, yes—until at last I went down to stay with a friend at a gorgeous place in the Cotswolds. There was a great grey manor-house, Jacobean and very good about the windows. My host gave me ham and eggs for breakfast: I had been used to omelettes and white wine. After breakfast—God, how I remember it—he took me across his wide, smooth lawns to talk to the keeper. We shot all day—I hadn't forgotten how to bowl over a pheasant—and then we dined and drank port and smoked cigars. Suddenly it all flashed across me, the fitness of things, the rich joy of escaping from chattering artists and cranks and reformers and all the crowds who had Done Something: I understood about pomp and circumstance. As I ate my ham and eggs next morning I became an initiate into their perfect mystery. (The eggs, I may say, must be fried, not poached.) The ham was a hill red with autumn and the eggs houses of gold in pure gardens of white. Then I swore to go back home and kick out the cotton king who used to come here for three weeks in the year. I would set up a new temple to the goddess and, worship her with all due rites. So I married my host's daughter, who was sound about ham and eggs and never played with fruit at breakfast-time, and here I am. I've stuck to it, for, as I said, you can't worship for a week and then go away: that isn't fair on the mystery. You've got to let things soak in. I've let the spirit of Ham and Eggs soak into me and I'm not tempted now to get it out again."
"And you didn't repent at the beginning?"
"Never permanently. I'm not idle. I'm a J.P., a soundly democratic J.P., to the disgust of the Colonels. I work on a host of committees and I direct two highly disreputable companies. Just because I like to live here in the country and be an acolyte for the goddess, there's no reason why I shouldn't do a lot besides. You can believe that I'm a much better squire than the rest of them. Of course I'm well aware that there oughtn't to be squires and that the whole thing is wrong. But equally plainly there are squires, and squiredom has its point, of which I may as well make the most. So I've played the part properly. To begin with, I put my farms on a business basis, gave a reasonable minimum, and became unpopular with my neighbours because I made them pay. If the State demands my abolition, I'll go like a shot, but I don't intend to let some magnate from Mincing Lane, who never eats ham, come and buy the place, redecorate the house—as he'd call it—buy some ancestors at Christie's and arrange an aerodrome. You young men think that because you like one sort of pleasure you've got to drop the others. It's all rubbish. I'll read any literature you want and talk you silly, but only after ham and eggs for breakfast and port wine for dinner. To hell with lunch!"
John Berrisford talked happily on and Martin was always pleased to listen.
"You're not converted?" said the elder man at last.
"Only on fine nights."
"Well you aren't fit for the mystery. Go away to your Latin Quarter and squalid digs and midnight settling of the universe."
So Martin went and found various members of his college living in contented poverty. It seemed to him that, at the rate at which they were existing, twenty-five pounds would keep him for a lifetime. Their nights were late but frugal and an ability to sleep saved the expense ofpetit déjeuner. They found where to obtain the noblest dinner for one franc fifty and made the acquaintance of artists, male and female, who would expound the whole theory of life and its artistic expression if someone paid for their drinks: which Martin did, purposing to improve his French. The weather was dry without being too hot, and one Sunday they went to Versailles in search of amusement, which materialised, for Martin and Lawrence, in the shape of two delightful women who said they had lost their way in the woods and needed a guide. Martin and Lawrence guided them with some skill to a house of refreshment, where the strangers became pleasantly intoxicated and very charming. They soon announced that they had lost their husbands as well as their way and were going to look for them at the station. Thither they went, with Martin and Lawrence following discreetly at a distance. The husbands were found to be in other company and the wives made a scene on the platform; it all ended by Martin and Lawrence, themselves not frigidly sober, removing the other company to a café and comforting their insulted dignity. They had a strange evening, and Martin learned a lot more French.
Owing to one or two reckless evenings he found himself a pauper just when the others were setting off to see Pierre Loti's fishermen, Paimpol and Guingamp and the quaint religion of the West. Of necessity he returned to Devonshire, fired with a determination to settle those texts which he had carried in vain to Paris.
He crossed by night and came down during the day. When he arrived, it was an evening of great beauty. Suddenly, as he was driven between banked hedges and silent woods of purest green, he came to view the mystery of Ham and Eggs as he had never viewed it before. He knew now how sick he was of Paris with its noise and penetrating smell of petrol, how tired of street cafés and superficial chattering about art. It struck him that if a man isn't going to create something he may as well shut his mouth and leave off jabbering for a bit. Here there was at least silence. Paris had been kindly in its way, but its way was sordid. He had been left with an impression that the city lacked baths and the citizens a cleanly comprehension. To forego ham and eggs and then to eat vastly in the middle of the day! What insipidity it showed, despite their reputation for taste. And there through a gap in the woods he saw The Steading, solid and calm as ever. Solidity and calmness counted, he knew, and what had Paris to do with them?
That evening he walked again with his uncle in the paddock, drinking in the sweet air, amazed at the restfulness.
"I enjoyed myself all the time," he said. "It was splendid!"
"That was good. And did you learn anything?"
"Nothing much from our talking. But I think I understand about the mystery."
"I thought Paris might drive it home; it used to smell so in August. Does it still?"
"In places." The scent of fir-trees came to him on the summer breeze. "I do see really," he added, almost pleadingly.
"I'm glad for your own sake. It's as well to look at the future. You may have to go to India. That may mean the end of books and talking and ideas. But you'll get reasonable pay and occasional leave and then you won't feel like anything but shooting and fishing. And perhaps when you're fifty or so you'll struggle back to this kind of existence. I assure you there's something in it all. And once you've dropped your philosophy of this and art of that for thirty years they won't come back. Ham and Eggs will be your only deity. But it isn't merely carnal."
"I see that," Martin replied.
Somehow the future did not seem so ugly to Martin as he stood watching the young moon hanging lightly over the dark shoulder of the moor. It would be good to come back and worship the goddess in Devonshire.
"Thanks for the initiation," he said as they turned back to the house.