The Balliols

by Alec Waugh

  For everyone; on that point he insisted: there must be others for whom the tide was running: who were at one with this new world, in step with it; not so much following its changes as directing them. Only who were they? Certainly not those for whom the Edwardian era had been spacious. It was others, for whom that era had been penurious and constrained, who were finding in Georgian England the climate that would mature their talents.

  Who were they? Listening to his father’s and Hugh’s talk, remembering what Malcolm had said, he wondered whether the same class of person whom the war had given a chance to rise into the officer’s class was not now being given by the peace a chance of self-establishment in that same world. He had heard it said that the “temporary gentleman” kind of officer would find it difficult when the war was over, going back to what he had been before. But in point of fact had they gone back, those that had genuine talent and ambition, men of the Smollett type?

  As far as he could gather most of the work at Peel & Hardy’s was done by Smollett; most of the responsibility was delegated to him. He had started at the foot of the ladder. He knew the business. That was the kind of man that was wanted in this new world; that was the kind of man he himself would have to be if he was going to succeed. The new world was going to be run by a different kind of man. The day of the big land-owners was at an end. They had been taxed out of their power. The Church had lost prestige. If no soldier had managed to rise to a position of political importance during the war, it was certain that none would be able to in peace. It was big business that was going to run the country. Trade had become so international that every political and diplomatic issue had become a matter of finance. Everything turned on money. The industrialists would have the first word and the last. So Francis deliberated with himself, following a line of argument that brought him back inevitably to its starting point. His talk with Malcolm.

  “I’ve got to meet that man again,” he thought.

  “Dear Mr. Malcolm (he wrote), I don’t suppose you will remember me by name, but I sat next you at tea when you came down to Fernhurst with Rosslyn Hill. And I had a talk with you last Christmas in your office. There is a matter about which I particularly wanted to ask your advice. May I call some time and see you?”

  The answer came by return of post. It was typewritten.

  “Such matters can be discussed more easily and very much more pleasantly over a lunch table. Will you lunch with me at the Granville Club; any day next week but Tuesday, at 1.25?”

  Malcolm was one of those who remain the same person against a series of different backgrounds. The same precise, stately figure who had fixed a luncheon for 1.25, had conducted the strategy of a football side from a distance of thirty yards, had convinced a prelate that his home would be incomplete till it possessed a cigarette box that played a tune, extended to Francis an ample welcome in the ante-room of the Granville Club.

  “I am uncertain as to what manner of beverage I should offer you,” he said. “In my day a prefect at a public school would have considered beer a pleasant but inessential adjunct to his digestion. Perhaps now a less robust generation prefers barley water. Or it may be that you are one of these bright young people who I am informed drink champagne for breakfast? I offer you the freedom of your choice.”

  He ordered the lunch in the same expansively avuncular manner.

  “In my day a young man would think nothing of putting away a dozen oysters and a steak and making a substantial cavity in a gorgonzola. But there are no real trenchermen to-day. I suppose that what you’d prefer is a grilled sole and some oatmeal biscuits?”

  At any ordinary time Francis would have been entertained by this kind of badinage, but he was nervous lest it would be continued right through the meal; lest Malcolm should follow the business etiquette of discussing nothing of importance till the coffee stage was reached, by which time he would, he suspected, be incapable of making the nature of his predicament plain to Malcolm. It was clear in his mind now, but by the end of lunch it very likely would have ceased to be. Malcolm had the sensitiveness, however, to perceive that his guest was incompletely at his ease.

  “Well, and what’s on your mind?” he said.

  All that Francis had been logically and systematically deliberating; all the carefully phrased and co-ordinated argument's were blurted out in a pell-mell of “What I really think’s” and “Don’t you agree with me that’s” from which Malcolm gradually disentangled Francis’s main concern: that the industrialists were the power of the future and that he wanted to come in on the ground floor.

  “So you have come to ask little Malcolm’s advice. I’m afraid I can’t promise you a rise to fame in the world of commerce quite so spectacular as his has been. At the same time …” He paused interrogatively.

  “I was wondering whether you couldn’t get me into Selfridge’s as one of these public school salesmen. I want to start at the bottom and work up.”

  “I see.”

  “I thought that if I were going to start at the bottom, I ought to start at once: that going up to Oxford would be a waste of time.”

  “If you are going into Selfridge’s, in that way, it would be best for you to go in at once.”

  “But could you get me in?”

  “I imagine so. At the same time …” He paused. He had dropped his facetious manner. His face had taken on a serious expression, since a serious matter was to be discussed.

  “It isn’t quite such an easy thing as you might imagine.”

  “You mean that I’ve been brought up soft.” On his face was a defensive, on-guard look, such as that with which ten years back his eldest sister had met the suggestion that she was not strong enough to be a militant. “You mean that I shouldn’t be able to stand being ordered about by people of another class; that I should lose my temper when customers made complaints; that it would go against the grain to call them ‘Sir.’”

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “No, it isn’t that; not altogether; though that is difficult. But not any more difficult than getting a commission through the ranks, which a great many from our class did. It’s the atmosphere of commerce. Things justified by results; not by intentions, as in certain other worlds they are. You’d be in competition with ruthlessly ambitious people. Don’t misunderstand me. There’s not a cut-throat feeling; not at all. There’s very much the same feeling of esprit de corps inside a big store that there is inside a school. They want to get on themselves. They know they can get on best if the firm’s doing well. There’s a team spirit. And because there’s that team spirit, nobody’s got any use for the man who isn’t trying, who isn’t working all out. Any more than a football side has. There’s no helping of lame dogs over stiles. They take work seriously there. The simile of the football team is a pretty sound one. The pace is set by the fastest, not the slowest. At a school the form has to wait till the dunce has understood. In a store like this one, if you can’t stay the pace, nobody’s going to stay behind to help you. You just drop out.”

  To Francis the existence of difficulties only made the adventure more exciting.

  “I could stand that.”

  “It’s a burning of your boats, you know,” Malcolm warned him. “It’s a bad job to fail at. It’s a road you can’t retrace. It’s not like reading for a law degree at Oxford and then finding after a year or two in chambers that the law isn’t your line of country. You can change on to another line. You’ve still got Oxford at the back of you. It’ll be very different to find yourself at twenty-one with nothing at the back of you except a failure at Oxford Street.”

  The word “failure” did not exist in the lexicon of Francis’s future.

  “You will arrange it for me, then?”

  “If your father approves.”

  “What’s it got to do with him?”

  “It’s got a good deal to do with him. A student, and that’s what you’ll be for at least six months, only gets a pound a week. We’ve got to be assured that while you are a student,
you are being properly looked after. Either in your father’s home, or in lodgings paid for by your father. If you bring me a signed statement from your father, then I’ll see what I can do.”

  Francis had little doubt that he could obtain eventually the certificate from his father. But he was certain that he would meet with opposition. The prospect of conflict on the whole pleased him. At the end he would have a feeling of achievement. His conscience was completely clear. He would not, as the Victorian novelists described it, be causing his parents pain. They would disapprove because they would consider it their duty as parents to disapprove; but presumably they would not care. They never had cared about him much. They had liked him. They had been generous. But they had never identified themselves with him in any way. They had never lived in him. Up to a point his mother had, until he had gone to Fernhurst. She had been quite different when he returned at the end of his first term. Possibly because he was different. He had been told that a mother often lost interest in a son when he ceased to be dependent on her. She had taken so little real interest in him that when he had converted his War Savings Certificates into calf-bound editions of the Oxford Classics, she was astonished at his demand for a special bookshelf.

  “Darling boy, I’d no idea that you’d been winning all those prizes.”

  “I told you every time.”

  “Did you, darling?”

  She was not really interested in him. She would not care whether he was a barrister or a salesman, or a professional footballer, “so long as you’re happy, dear boy”; leaving him to discover happiness for himself. As for his father, Francis could not picture the issue that he would regard as personal to himself. He took the same detached interest in his son’s career as in the composition of the Ryder Cup Team. It was Hugh that he looked on as his chief opponent.

  Hugh returned home in a belligerent mood that evening. A number of little things were going wrong. To begin with there had been a rather irritating discussion at Peel & Hardy’s that had ended in his relinquishing his office room to Smollett’s secretary. The discussion had been conducted in an extremely amiable and pacific manner. It was clear that Smollett must have a secretary. His correspondence was considerable. There was a great deal of routine work that he needed to be spared. It was also essential that she should have a room of her own to work in. Smollett received a number of callers. He needed to be alone with them. There was, however, no obviously available room for her. Room by room the geography of the offices had been considered; until finally Hugh’s corridor was reached. Smollett was drawing a diagram. He pointed his pencil at Hugh.

  “Now, let me see. At the end there’s your room, Balliol.”

  “Yes, there’s my room.”

  There was a pause.

  “I suppose you really need that room?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I know, of course, that you are frequently interviewing clients, or prospective clients. Your accounts prove that. But I was wondering how much of your work doesn’t fit in with your ordinary life. I wondered how often you actually did use that room.”

  “Well…” Hugh hesitated. He used his room quite a bit because his club was in Grosvenor Square and it was useful to have a place that you could pop into when you had ten minutes to dawdle away in Piccadilly, and where, for that matter, you could get a buckshee glass of sherry. But he doubted in point of fact if he had used it officially more than twice a month. He suspected that Smollett was aware of this.

  “Because,” Smollett was continuing, “I was thinking that if you didn’t really use the room as much as you thought you were going to, it might be simpler for a time at any rate to move my secretary in there, than to divide up my own room into two with a partition. We could do that, of course, but it isn’t really very convenient. One hears every word through that matchboard, and typing, even with a modern machine, is noisy. I naturally don’t want to disturb you in any way, but I was just thinking that if you don’t really need that room.…”

  “I don’t.”

  It was said quickly and decisively. His father had looked at him with surprised interrogation. Hugh was very well aware that he could have retained the room, had he even so much as said that it was a convenience to him. Which it was. But definitely it was not a necessity. He would have hated to have kept the room when a man like Smollett was grudging him, and after all with justice, his possession of it; was keeping count of the use he made of it. Ownerships were only pleasant when they could be enjoyed freely, and with propriety. As far, anyhow, as he was concerned.

  He gave no sign that he was annoyed.

  “I hardly use the room at all,” he had said. “Certainly, you take it.”

  “Of course, later on—if you find you do really need it …” Smollett had assured him.

  “I’ll let you know all right.”

  But he had been annoyed. Or rather, the episode of the room had been contributory to a mood of general irritation. There had been other factors. There had been that girl he had met yesterday at lunch. They had sat next each other. She had been gay, debonair. He suspected wilful. He fancied he had been a success with her. “I’d like to see more of her,” he had thought. But when you hadn’t a flat it was very difficult without spending a good deal of money to develop an acquaintance. And it was just because he hadn’t any money at the moment that he was without a flat. If he had had a flat, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to have said, “I’ve got one or two people dropping in at cocktail time to-morrow. Won’t you come?” That would have been easy and informal. They would have had an opportunity of making up their minds about each other. But without a flat he would have to make some rather ample gesture. Arrange a lunch party, or take her to a theatre. And that would be only the beginning. A flat was essential if you were going to conduct a campaign of gallantry; unless you had a great deal of money. In another three months he would have his flat back, and he would have economized enough to have an amusing time with it. But that would be too late; as regards this girl anyhow. You had to strike while the iron was hot. It was maddening to be so broke. Nobody seemed to have the money to lay down cellars nowadays. None of the people he knew, anyway. They drank beer or whisky; or on occasions took a couple of bottles of club champagne back with them from their club. He wasn’t making the half of what he’d hoped.

  And on top of all that he had woken to one of his bad mornings; a headache, lassitude, no appetite. He didn’t get enough exercise, he supposed. But it was hard to keep fit, when doctors denied him the particular forms of training by which Londoners kept well. Before the war he had played squash twice a week during his lunch hour. But squash was considered too violent for him now. It was hard to find golf partners on a week-day, particular in the winter, when the ground was either frozen hard or so soft that the ball stopped when it pitched, and the fairways were thick with worm casts. He had to take his exercise in Turkish Baths. That wasn’t the same thing. In cold weather his legs began to hurt. And it was all very Well his friends telling him that he’d feel worse next day if he doctored himself with whisky. They didn’t know what it was like to sit through an evening with the whole of one side of one’s body throbbing. Never knowing when the throbbing was to be punctuated by the stab of a sudden twinge. In 1917 he had thought himself very lucky to have his lungs full of mustard gas and his thigh of metal. He was beginning to think that it was the others who had been lucky.

  He returned home in no mood to accept with equanimity his younger brother’s decision to become a salesman at Selfridge’s.

  It was in point of fact the vehemence of Hugh’s opposition, that, in the last analysis, decided Francis to make good his boast. Hugh returned home at the point where Francis was beginning to waver. His father had brought forward a number of sensible arguments.

  “There are a number of points to be considered,” he had said. “I am not saying that you are mistaken in your contention that it is by the big industrialists that the country is going to be governed in th
e future. I daresay you are right in thinking that those who have begun at the foot of the ladder stand the best chance of climbing to the top. A store such as Selfridge’s, which makes a point of training public schoolboys, would certainly give you the best chance. At the same time, there does not seem to me to be as much need for hurry as you suppose. I am not being what in the melodramas of my boyhood was described as ‘the heavy father.’ I am not saying that you will think differently in two years’ time. But there is a possibility that you may. After all, you feel differently now from the way in which you felt two years ago. If you go into Selfridge’s at once, and find two years later that that kind of life is unsympathetic to you, you will be in a difficult position. You will have prejudiced your chances of making a success at Oxford, and will consequently have cut yourself off from all those callings to which a successful career at Oxford is the necessary prelude. If, on the other hand, you finish your time at Fernhurst, go up to Oxford, feel at the end of a year that you are wasting your time, you will still be able to go into Selfridge’s, at the loss of only a few months. It seems to me that by going to Oxford for a year you have everything to gain and nothing at all to lose. Very likely you will feel out of touch with Oxford, but I think you should give yourself a chance of seeing what it is like. You have been born with certain material advantages. It would be a mistake to discard those advantages until you know precisely what it is that you are discarding.”

  He spoke calmly, reasonably. Francis was half convinced. Then Hugh arrived.

  “We are engaged,” his father told him, “on what is popularly described as a family council. Your brother has expressed a wish to leave Fernhurst and graduate at Selfridge’s as a salesman.”