They all laughed except Marain. He, of course, had known the story already. George had become aware of that half-way through the telling. He rose suddenly, placing his unfinished glass of beer on the mantelpiece. “Goodbye, David. What about dinner some time next week? Good. We’ll arrange that.”
George gave an easy smile all round, and as he closed the door firmly behind him he took a deep breath of relief. David was a very decent chap, even if his politics were impossible, but why did he have such peculiar friends? Burns was all right. Except that he went about too much with Marain. He had certainly got in with the wrong crowd if he really wanted to understand England. Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? “We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince everyone, including ourselves, that we don’t even notice the audience.” George frowned for a moment, and then he laughed to himself. That was just David being David. Odd fellow, David, and yet likable. But he wasn’t normal: falling heavily in love, wanting to get married, giving up all idea of the Foreign Office. Definitely not normal.
George swung his long leg over his bicycle—his driving licence had been suspended last week after a normal argument with a normal haystack at the normal speed of sixty-five miles an hour—and pedalled his way briskly to his normal rooms in the High. There would be a decent dinner at the Grid tonight, and it would probably work up to some fun in the Quad afterwards round a bonfire. There were at least two chaps disliked enough this term to have the furniture in their rooms supply firewood. And that little pipsqueak, with the green pullover and the lisp, who quoted Mallarmé at you would have to be debagged. Matter of discipline. All perfectly normal. Yes, George decided, as he found the reflection in the looking-glass quite satisfactory and shook out a crisply laundered handkerchief to slip into his cuff, yes, it was going to be a very pleasant evening. All normal chaps there, thank God.
21
POST-MORTEM ON FRIENDSHIP
They listened to George’s heavy brogue shoes clattering down the staircase. David put the copy of transition back in its place. George, he was thinking, usually remembered things: he must have been more rattled by Marain than he had looked.
“What’s wrong with that guy, anyway?” Burns asked bluntly. “Or are we typhoid-carriers?”
“Oh, he’s all right,” David said.
Marain was wandering about the room now, picking up the invitation cards standing on the mantelpiece, reading them with well-concealed interest and apparent amusement. David watched him with a grin, and paused in talking to Burns to remove some open letters and postcards out of Marain’s eyeshot. “Against the rules, old man, when the owner is in his rooms,” he remarked, and turned to Burns again. Burns was smiling too. Marain looked quite unperturbed, picked up a magazine, and sat down to read it.
“Go on about Fenton-Stevens,” Burns said. “What do you mean by all right?” Burns was a direct man who approached arguments eagerly: he considered them the fair means for an exchange of information. “I’ve met him half a dozen times, and he always seems a fool. Very much on his dignity, and nothing to be dignified about except what his father has given him.”
“Was Marain with you these half-dozen times?” David asked. Burns’s eyebrows went up at this new idea.
Marain looked away from the magazine. “Why waste good breath on a first-rate fool? What do you see in such an idiot, David?”
“Perhaps you have a bad effect on him,” David said quietly.
“He paralyses me,” Marain said. “He has an infinite capacity for being tedious. He will do well in the Foreign Office. One of our future policy-makers. God help us.” He adjusted his body comfortably in the best chair, poured himself some beer, and turned a page of the magazine. He raised an eyebrow at some statement which caught his eye, and dismissed the others from his presence.
“That’s my point,” Burns went on. “He thinks he is a natural for the governing classes. Right education, right connexions, right everything. Does that make a man a natural for anything except having himself a whale of a time? The life of Riley, if you can get it. And those who have it damned well see that they keep it in the family. Take a guy like this Fenton-Stevens. He and his crowd just represent less than two per cent of the population: all the other ninety-eight per cent don’t talk like him or live his way. But he is convinced he is typical of Britain, and so he and his friends have got to represent her. Matter of duty, I suppose. It is also the life of Riley: better than going down a mine, or delivering milk, or wearing the seat of your pants out on a clerk’s hard chair. They’ll tell you, of course, that the miner or the milkman or the clerk just haven’t got the stuff it takes to do the governing or save the country. How do they know that? Who told them except themselves? If you ask me, this country is weighted down with its dead wood— the ‘all right’ guys who use up the best jobs. And you all keep accepting it, instead of using an axe.”
“The trouble about using an axe,” David said, “is that it may be used against you, and that isn’t according to plan. Perhaps Marain’s next editorial would see him installed in a neat six-by-eight-foot cell. That is, if his political opponents grabbed the axe before he could.”
Marain looked up to say, “It is quite simple. David wants no action, and is content to continue with things as they are, although it is against his interests and the interests of forty million other people in this country. They don’t seem to understand where their interests lie. That’s all.”
“That’s all,” David said, “except that you did not state my case accurately. I want change too. But I believe that change will depend on just how much the majority of us want something. If we are content with the second best because it is ‘safe,’ then we shall just go on getting a good second best. So the decision really rests with all the forty million people Marain pities so much. That’s where I begin to disagree with him. I believe that if there is to be a change they have to earn it for themselves. Not by violence, but by thinking things out. Get an intelligent electorate, and then an intelligent election, and soon there will be plenty of house-cleaning. Provided, of course, that the people go on thinking things out for themselves. As soon as they stop doing that, dead wood will collect again, no matter what variety of political party is in power.”
“He would have been a most converting missionary,” Marain said to Burns, and his annoyance sharpened when the American did not return his amused smile. Burns was, in fact, still watching David. “It is getting rather late,” Marain said suddenly, and rose to his feet. “I’m giving dinner to Furness in Hall tonight. We are starting a new magazine, and I was thinking of him as assistant editor. He is a sound man in many ways.”
And writes like a piece of boiled ham, David thought. No sense of the use of the English language at all. Marain would be editor, of course: Marain played second fiddle to no man.
“I thought of you,” Marain went on, “but you are frightfully busy this year, aren’t you?” And that meant that Marain had come here with the idea of offering the job of assistant editor to David. I am being disciplined, David thought. Really, Marain, you do like to crack the whip. To hell with you!
Burns looked surprised at Marain’s recent statements, and then he said quickly, in embarrassment, “We are calling it Experiment. Here’s the blurb. Wrote it this morning.” He pulled out a folded sheet of typescript, which had already been handled a good deal during its short life. David took it and read it as he was persuading himself that he had indeed no time to be editing a magazine this spring.
“It isn’t a purely Oxford affair,” Burns was saying. “There will be contributors from Cambridge and London. We hope.”
“Better give the Cambridge men more space on the editorial board if you want to keep them interested,” David said, and then regretted his words. For Marain’s smile became real at his
obvious annoyance. “Hello,” David said suddenly, in surprise. “How did he get here?” He pointed to the name of Roger Breen.
“One of the London boys. Marain found him,” Burns explained. “He’s financing us.”
“You mean his father is. And his father won’t like your magazine.”
“His father can’t read,” Marain said.
“Look, Marain, why get involved with a man like Breen? He is only using you politically as he is using his father financially.”
Marain wasn’t smiling now. Burns was looking at him questioningly, as if he believed Bosworth. By attacking Breen, Bosworth was attacking his judgment. “I can deal with Breen,” he said coldly.
“What’s wrong with him, anyway?” Burns asked. “He is only a name to me.”
“He is one of my sister’s friends,” David said shortly.
“And Bosworth doesn’t like him,” Marain explained. Sister-fixation, his amused eyebrow said.
“I know what I dislike,” David said.
“He must be very grim,” Marain said lightly.
“If it becomes fashionable among the so-called intelligentsia to wear black shirts, Breen will be out there in front of them mimicking Mussolini.”
“And if it were fashionable to be a Liberal?”
David shook his head. “There isn’t enough violence in Liberalism for Breen,” he said. “He has a mountainous inferiority complex. He has got to justify himself by extremes. He thinks strong methods prove strength. You know, if the revolution he is always talking about did come, he wouldn’t find that position of power which he thinks he will get. He isn’t good enough. Funny to see all these self-appointed controllers being left in the rank and file.”
“Very funny,” Marain said, but he looked at David sharply. David was not only thinking of the Breens in this world, he knew.
David handed back the sheet of paper to Burns, who was silent but interested. He had become accustomed by this time to the peculiar English way of argument, to the hidden conflict, the battle of innuendo, the gently placed barbs. Marain perhaps was just annoyed that David was so damned independent. Marain usually dominated the men he met. Dominated? Burns looked at Marain critically. He felt the blurb in his pocket, and remembered how many of his suggestions for it had been side-tracked, so gently, so smilingly. Hell, he thought, w’ell see about this.
Burns rose to his feet. “Must go now,” he said to David. They exchanged smiles. Marain looked slightly startled for one moment that he had not been the first to leave. And then he recovered himself, and with his usual brief farewell remarks left the room. At least, he would be the first to do that.
It didn’t matter to Burns. His grin broadened. As he went downstairs by himself—Marain was showing his displeasure by walking determinedly on ahead of him—he was crumpling the blurb for Experiment in his pocket as he reminded himself to see more of Bosworth.
22
FANTASIA AND FUGUE
David listened to the dying footsteps, and thought about Marain. It was a strange feeling to have decided so suddenly that friendship was no longer friendship. Either Marain has changed or I have changed, he thought. Once his clever-cruel quickness was amusing, even when it was directed against me. Now he is becoming rather a bore: you can always depend on him to make remarks in character every bit as much as Fenton-Stevens. And he is becoming rather simple-minded: he judges people by their politics. That alone isn’t enough. It isn’t a man’s political beliefs which make him a good or bad man: it is the way he uses his beliefs, the actions which his own humanity will make him do or refuse to do. Behaviour, not belief, is the standard. A man may talk and talk, and be a fake. A man may think he proves a lot by admiring poetry, smiling at children, growing sentimental over charming songs, but he proves a lot more by ignoring or tolerating violence and cruelty. (This is where Father would start the fourth chapter of his lectures on the problem of Germany.) If Marain would only see the whole of a man, and not just—hell and damnation, why waste any more of my energy in coping with Marain? I’ve changed, David thought. I just don’t give a damn what Marain thinks of me. He felt like a man who has decided to clear out a lot of useless furniture from his house and, equally amazed at his own temerity and at the improvement, wonders why he postponed the decision so long. It seems easy enough now that it has been made.
David picked up his letter to Penny which he would post on his way to dinner in Hall. He began thinking about her, and a smile came to his lips, and his whole face softened. He no longer felt dogmatic and stupid and inadequate, as Marain had left him.
“You are a tonic, darling,” he said to the photograph with its warm smile and laughing eyes. And that was true, a fact which would seem absurd to the cynical. He had only to start thinking about Penny, and all his worries—his father’s health, his work, his possible inefficiency in his future job with Fairbairn if he got the job, Margaret, the lack of money, himself, and what he believed or couldn’t believe—all these took proper proportion in his mind. He could face any worry if he had Penny. He tried to remember the inflexion in her voice when he had said something quite preposterous, and she would laugh and say “David!” half believing because it was he who had said it, half sceptical as she saw the beginning of a smile in his eyes. He bent down and kissed the photograph.
* * *
Outside the lane was dark and quiet. The row of tall, thin houses with their deep, sharp-pointed roofs formed a curving wall of shadows, pressing forward into the lane to blot it out. Round the corner the busy little street was quietening, but there were still signs of life in it. Later it would fall like the lane into its deep night sleep. (Streets are like children, David thought: the small ones go to bed first.) Patches of yellow light came from windows, wide open in spite of the weather. There was the sound of voices and of gramophone records from successful sherry parties which had forgotten dinner. On the pavement, ahead of David and behind him, were the quick footsteps of undergraduates who had delayed too long and now must hurry towards their colleges. Like David, too, they wore no hat or overcoat, although there was a dank cold in the air and a chill from the wet pavement. They had slung round their necks, and over their shoulders, the crumpled black cotton gowns (hip-length for commoners, knee-length for scholars) which they must wear to enter their college dining-hall. Those whose colleges were some distance away had borrowed bicycles, and were pedalling determinedly up the imperceptible hill (you never noticed it unless you were late) with bodies bent forward over the handlebars and the black gowns slipping off their shoulders. David increased his pace: he must be later than he had imagined. One always was, in Oxford.
This has all become a part of my life, he thought: I accept it as if it were absolutely normal. At first it had seemed strange—the old houses and crowding towers, the sky filled with medieval spires—and when it had been strange there had been a constant but well-concealed admiration and awe. Everyone felt that way to begin with. And then those who liked phrases would begin to speak of wedding-cake architecture and bastard Gothic. It wouldn’t do any of us any harm, he suddenly thought, if we were made to spend our fifth term in some manufacturing town with a Victorian University raising its horrors in a street of smoke and grime. Beauty deserved better than casual acceptance. Perhaps it was time to end this stage of his life. He had a short stab of remorse as he realised he was excited instead of saddened by the idea. For he had been happy here.
The bell was ending its three minutes’ warning as he passed through the vaulted portcullis gate into Holywell College. A handful of undergraduates were still lingering in front of the notice-boards on one side of the deep entrance, and a couple were trying to borrow a gown for Hall from the Porter’s Lodge opposite. He entered the cloisters which led round the green quadrangle, and then slackened his pace as he saw the white-haired, shoulder-bent figure of the Senior Tutor in front of him. Perhaps you had to be as old as the Senior Tutor to feel sadness when a stage of your life was almost over, for then each stage could be
the final one.
The mournful bell slowed down, as if its strength were ebbing away, and then stopped with a small, dim echo, leaving a foolish silence hanging in the air. There was a sudden rush of running footsteps behind David, as the men at the notice-board scattered towards the Hall. The Senior Tutor’s flapping black gown disappeared into the Senior Common Room’s doorway, and David began running too. The large oak door was shut before he reached it. This is what comes of thinking of old age, David reminded himself, and waited with the others until Grace had been said and the heavy door was opened once more. It would close again after the first course had been served, and those who came then would have to find dinner elsewhere.
David’s sett was at the Scholars’ table. McIllwain and Halsey had kept a place for him, he noted, and remembered suddenly that they had arranged to sit beside each other tonight. There was that matter of discussing the programme for the next Musical Union concert, when Myra Hess had been invited to play. He had forgotten all about it, and he had almost turned away from the hall door as he had had to wait outside, and probably would have if he had had enough loose cash in his pocket for a dinner at the George or the Clarendon—he had given up signing cheques; they had a way of giving you an extra sinking in the pit of your stomach when you opened your bank statement. But the clatter of plates as the scouts served the long tables at a half-run (four courses were served and eaten within thirty minutes) helped to cover his momentary confusion.
“Thought you had forgotten,” Halsey said cheerily, and joined David’s smile at such an impossibility.
David listened to McIllwain, talking with Scots intensity about the merits of Bach and the demerits of Delius (Halsey being very pro-Delius at the moment), but his mind followed its own direction.
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