‘Look at this!’ he exclaimed. ‘An aeroplane couldn’t pick what I picked in a field this morning, could it now? Why, I tell you, my friends, in a hundred years’ time, that charabanc of yours will be withered away, shrivelled like a blade of grass!’ He paused triumphantly, as if waiting to be heckled—perhaps he was down here on holiday from Hyde Park—but the trippers merely looked uncomfortable; one or two of them attempted sheepish grins, the rest studiously avoided the madman with their eyes; they wished he would go away.
‘And I’ll tell you something else,’ bawled the little man: ‘If England can produce a black man, she can produce the sun. Ha, ha! That’s got some of you, hasn’t it?’
The charabanc driver now hastily reappeared and jumped into his seat. The madman greeted him with a deep ironical bow; the driver laughed and shouted a greeting—they seemed to know each other quite well. The madman waved, gaily and ironically, as the charabanc drove away. Then he got down from the wall and strolled off quietly, pausing for a moment to tap the stone-work with his crooked fore-finger, as though he expected to find that it was hollow. The result of his experiment seemed to sadden him a little. ‘The man who built this,’ I heard him murmur to himself, ‘must have thought he was living in Ancient Egypt!’
After this the little man used to turn up quite often at the Bay. Sometimes he preached to the trippers, sometimes he walked backwards and forwards along the beach, with very careful deliberate paces, as though he were taking measurements. He seldom stayed more than half an hour. I made various attempts to get into conversation with him; but, interviewed privately, he was unsatisfactory. He ignored my questions with the conceited secretive smile of a great politician who is being tactlessly pestered by a cub reporter. He wasn’t going to waste his wisdom on an audience of one.
Staying at the big hotel on the downs behind the Bay was a young man to whom I had taken an immediate, unreasonable, savage dislike. He was large and handsome, with crimped yellow hair and a prominent, well-moulded, cleft chin. I had never spoken to him; but I had once heard him remark, as he strolled past, in earnest conversation with the curate: ‘Of course, if one leads a pretty full life …’ From these words, I had reconstructed, most unfairly, his entire character.
One morning the madman and I were standing together outside the pub when I saw the ‘full-life’ young man approaching. With him was a girl (also staying at the hotel) who was, at the moment, my female public enemy number one. She had a sing-song voice, an air of being deadly keen on everything and the kind of square-cut bobbed hair which made one long to give her a terrific, sadistic kick on the behind. She had once remarked, in my presence, that somebody or other was ‘fearfully stimulating.’ I only wished Chalmers could have seen her. His command of invective was so much greater than my own.
‘Look at those two,’ I appealed to the madman. ‘Surely you’ll tell us something about them, won’t you?’
To my delight, the little man rose, most unexpectedly, to the occasion. He broke into peals of loud, stagey laughter; and as the couple passed, quite close to him, talking quickly and self-consciously, their eyes riveted to the horizon, he pointed his finger straight at them and shouted: ‘Look at them! There they go! Adam and Eve!’
There was much applause from the half dozen loungers who formed his audience. But neither the young man nor the girl looked back. They only seemed to stiffen, a little; their movements were suddenly and ridiculously speeded up, as in a quick-motion film; their two figures disappeared, with jerky rapidity, round the corner, down the steps which led to the beach.
The Full-Lifer, like the rest of the hotel guests, bathed in a tiny inlet of the Bay, right under the cliff, where the hotel had provided its own special bathing-cabins and raft. And I had taken to bathing there, too. It was my horrible, fascinating little aquarium, which I never tired of studying. I was passing through yet another of my pseudo-scientific phases of class hatred. For Chalmers’ benefit, I took verbatim notes of the scraps of dialogue I heard on the beach—though nothing but gramophone records could have done justice to those special intonations and accentuations which seemed, to my hypersensitive ear, to convey the very essence of these people’s lives:
‘John proceeds to swim out to the raft …’
‘The stones are hard to the feet …’
‘He couldn’t hit the town he was born in …’
‘Hi, you slacker, come on in!’
‘Wha?’
‘Come on in!’
‘Is it cold?’
‘Wha?’
‘I said: Is it COLD?’
The coldness of the water was, of course, their inexhaustible joke. Indeed, there was, I thought, something profoundly significant in the hotel guests’ whole attitude to the sea. They were very careful, I told Chalmers in my letters, not to take the sea too seriously. They were, in fact, afraid of it, as they were afraid of all the great natural forces. They were afraid of surrendering themselves to it, lest, in their exhilaration, they should do something silly, should give themselves away. This was why they bathed in a ridiculous little landlocked pool, which they could pretend was a kind of swimming-bath, instead of walking for a quarter of a mile over the downs to the enormous empty bay, where there were real waves which knocked you down even on the calmest day, and where you could shout out loud, if you liked, and scream and talk to yourself in nonsense languages and sing passages out of imaginary operas—in fact, behave like a human being. But no: bathing, for these people, was something rather childish, slightly to be ashamed of, to be got through quickly, just before lunch, so as to leave plenty of time for the ball games which formed the really serious business of the holiday. And so, even while they were in the water, their jokes tacitly apologized for what they were doing; some bathers even behaved with an elaborately parodied childishness, just to show that they were well aware that this wasn’t, in any sense, proper adult ‘sport.’
Also, of course, the majority of the men were secretly embarrassed at finding themselves practically naked in the presence of a lot of semi-naked and (presumably to them) attractive girls. And this subconscious embarrassment had the effect of bringing out, in each individual, some characteristic defect in carriage or stance; the scarcely visible limp became accentuated, the sloping shoulders drooped more miserably than ever, while the stiffly muscle-bound torso bulged into a ridiculous caricature of itself and its owner trotted snorting into the water like an absurd little bull. Surprisingly few of them, it seemed, could swim more than a few yards. Many a young man would strike out, with powerful faultless strokes, as if starting for France, and then, as he passed the diving-raft, turn abruptly aside and grab hold of it, gasping violently for breath.
But beneath all my note-taking, my would-be scientific detachment, my hatred, my disgust, there was the old sense of exclusion, the familiar grudging envy. For, however I might sneer, these people were evidently enjoying themselves in their own mysterious fashion, and why was it so mysterious to me? Weren’t they of my own blood, my own caste? Why couldn’t I—the would-be novelist, the professional observer—understand them? Why didn’t I know—not coldly from the outside, but intuitively sympathetically, from within—what it was that made them perform their grave ritual of pleasure; putting on blazers and flannels in the morning, plus-fours or white trousers in the afternoon, dinner jackets in the evening; playing tennis, golf, bridge; dancing, without a smile, the fox-trot, the tango, the blues; smoking their pipes, reading the newspapers, organizing a sing-song, distributing prizes after a fancy-dress ball? True, I wasn’t alone in my isolation. Chalmers, had he been here, would have felt just as I did. Madame Cheuret would have said: ‘Not really very cosy.’ Weston, despite his enthusiasm for the English, would have made these bathers the text for a grandly patronizing psycho-analytical lecture. People like my friends and myself, I thought, are to be found in little groups in all the larger towns; we form a proudly self-sufficient, consciously declassed minority. We had our jokes, we amuse each other enormously; we a
re glad, we say, that we are different. But are we really glad? Does anybody ever feel sincerely pleased at the prospect of remaining in permanent opposition, a social misfit, for the rest of his life? I knew, at any rate, that I myself didn’t. I wanted—however much I might try to persuade myself, in moments of arrogance, to the contrary—to find some place, no matter how humble, in the scheme of society. Until I do that, I told myself, my writing will never be any good; no amount of talent or technique will redeem it: it will remain a greenhouse product; something, at best, for the connoisseur and the clique. And I envied Philip, that amazing social amphibian. He alone, of all my friends, could have met the hotel guests in their own element; could have talked their language and observed their customs: could have been accepted by them as one of themselves. It was Philip, not Weston, who truly understood ‘the English’; it was Philip, not myself, whom nature had equipped to be their novelist. The most I shall ever achieve, I thought, will be to learn how to spy upon them, unnoticed. Henceforward, my problem is how to perfect a disguise.
I had a disguise, of sorts, already; but it wasn’t intended for the hotel guests. Every morning, after bathing, I strolled along the shingle bank, to pay my daily visit to Bruiser and Tim, the fishermen, who looked after old Mr Straw’s boats. Bruiser was a big hearty man, tattooed all over his chest, who worked fifteen or sixteen hours a day, partly at the boats, partly in the quarry, getting up in the middle of the night to row out and attend to his lobster pots. The combined earnings of his various trades were just sufficient to keep himself, his wife and his five-year-old son alive in a tumbledown cottage, on meals of butcher’s leavings, margarine and bread. Bruiser, despite his robust appearance, had something the matter with his lungs. He could neither read nor write. His sharp brown eyes twinkled with good-humoured contempt for all summer visitors, white-collar workers and for everybody who stayed in bed after six a.m. ‘Good evening,’ he would greet me, ironically: ‘Lovely day it’s been.’
‘Why,’ Tim would exclaim, looking up from his net-mending: ‘If it isn’t our Marmaduke! How fwightfully allurin’. Well, Marmaduke, and how’s the trahsers?’
This was our stock joke. The truth was (it embarrasses me a little to have to admit this, even now) that, in my eagerness to make myself acceptable to Bruiser and Tim—and, no doubt, to dissociate myself from my class-mates on the bathing beach—I had half-consciously assumed a slight Cockney twang. Tim, whose vowels were from Portsmouth, had, of course, noticed it at once; indeed, he would probably have found my ordinary university accent much less remarkable and comic. But, having started, I couldn’t stop; and, after a few days’ practice, I found myself slipping quite naturally into my disguise-language whenever the two boatmen or any of the other villagers were present. It was all rather ridiculous, and I’m sure it didn’t take in Bruiser for a moment. I never felt really at ease under his bright ironical eye. Tim was less critical. Having accepted me as a casual gossip and drinking companion, he asked no questions of any kind—not even my name.
The companionship of Tim seemed, to my violently inverted snobbery, the peak of my social ambition at the Bay; I had set myself to win it with all the wiles that the most assiduous climber could practise upon a millionaire or a duke. I was never so happy as when squatting beside him outside Mr Straw’s hut, drinking with him at the pub, or accompanying him to the dance-hall in the village. I did my best to acquire that slow insulting stare (so discomforting when directed upon oneself) with which Bruiser and Tim followed the movements of a tripper. I grinned obsequiously at Tim’s favourite catchphrases and jokes: ‘How fwightfully allurin’ … Many moons ago, when the world was young … The man who killed the Dead Sea whitewashing the Last Post …’ The greatest mark of favour ever (apparently) bestowed upon me by Bruiser was his suggestion, one Saturday afternoon when they were short-handed, that I should row some of the hotel guests out to sea for a view of the lighthouse. There was an unpleasant swell that day, and after half an hour in the glaring sunshine without a hat I began to feel distinctly seasick; but the visitors were all excellent sailors and determined to have their money’s worth. They asked questions about place names, distances and the heights of the cliffs which I couldn’t correctly answer, though I did my best, obstinately maintaining my cockney twang. They disembarked at last, not a moment too soon, without tipping me. Bruiser eyed my greenish face, grinned cynically but said nothing. I had the sensation of having failed yet another test.
It was during the evenings that I finally managed to earn Tim’s esteem. Tim was extremely vain of his powers as a lady-killer. ‘You see, Marmaduke,’ he would explain, ‘I’ve got It.’ He was seventeen years old, had a good figure and the face of an attractive monkey. His snub nose was covered with innumerable black freckles, which he was never tired of admiring in the splinter of looking-glass nailed to the wall of the hut: ‘Handsome men,’ he assured me, ‘is slightly sunburnt.’ Apparently the girls thought so too. Tim’s spare time was a round of assignations—he called it ‘spicket-drill.’ Together, we visited the local cinema, picked up a couple of girls and cuddled them throughout the performance. I found that I was particularly good at cuddling; especially after three or four ‘dog’s noses’ (gin and beer) at the pub. Indeed, my very inhibitions made me extremely daring—up to a point. Tim, who really meant business, was often curiously shy in the opening stages. Once or twice, having pushed things farther than I had intended, I was scared to find myself committed to a midnight walk over the downs. But, on these occasions, I always discovered an excuse for passing my girl on to Tim. Next morning, he would be grateful and suitably impressed. ‘You ought to have seen our Marmaduke last night,’ he would tell Bruiser. ‘Honest, I was surprised … Our Marmaduke’s a dark horse—ain’t you Marmaduke?’
One afternoon we seemed to be on the verge of a tragedy. Tim had set out that morning in Mr Straw’s big motor-boat with a party of schoolgirls for a trip down the coast. They were due back at lunch time: at five o’clock they still hadn’t returned. A thick woolly fog was settling down upon the sea. Everybody in the Bay became mildly excited; and most of us were standing along the sea-wall or watching from the beach, when, shortly before six, the missing boat emerged unexpectedly from the dense coiling vapours, scarcely a stone’s throw from the shore. The motor had broken down, hours before, and while Tim was vainly trying to repair it the launch had drifted slowly out to sea. At length, he had been forced to row the heavy boat home as best he could, with a pair of unequally sized oars.
Tim seemed very little the worse for his ordeal. With a couple of monkey-like bounds he reached the top of the shingle bank and began pulling off his rubber boots, humming, as he did so, his favourite song:
Waitin’ fer ther moon
Ter shine, ter show me the way
Ter get yer ter say
I love yer …
But the schoolgirls were in a sorry condition. Most of them were in tears and some had been sick. A mistress who had not taken part in the expedition dramatically embraced her colleague as she disembarked, and joined her, after casting a furious glance in Tim’s direction, in shepherding the frightened and shivering girls away to their hot tea, consolation and bed.
‘How I wish they’d all drowned!’ said a voice at my elbow.
I turned to find, standing beside me, a young man whom I knew by sight already. I had passed him several times in the village street, hurrying along, hatless, in gym shoes, with a heavy walking-stick and a powerful, curiously wooden stride which suggested some unseen injury. He was gawkily tall; his small untidy mobile head was set upon gaunt shoulders; the eyes nervous, alert and puzzled. His whole appearance was that of an overgrown nervy boy. He might easily have passed for less than twenty years old.
His name, he told me, was Lester—by this time we were having a drink together at the pub—and he lived in a tent, in a field behind the Methodist Chapel.
‘Do you always live in tents?’ I asked.
‘Mostly. I had a caravan, for a bit. But
I prefer tents. Got used to them in the Army.’
In 1915, a few weeks after his sixteenth birthday, Lester had joined the H.A.C. Stationed at the Tower, he had had to guard condemned German spies. ‘I’m ready to swear one of them was innocent. He was a Dutchman. The night before we shot him, he made such a row that nobody could get any sleep. Kept yelling out at me, over and over again: “Have mercy!” Seemed to think I could help him. In the end, I got so rattled I started cursing him. I felt bloody ashamed about it afterwards …’ Lester had had a fight with another boy, hardly older than himself, who was cocky and boastful because he had been chosen to go out to France on an earlier draft. The other boy had been killed within twenty-four hours of reaching the front. And Lester had survived to see the last drafts go out in autumn of 1918, escorted down to the station by military police, for fear of wholesale desertion.
After this, he and I met frequently; sometimes we sat together in the garden of Beach View, under the boat-shaped veranda; sometimes I trotted beside him as he strode stiffly over the downs, brandishing his heavy dangerous stick. Once, he told me, he had used it to knock out three members of a racetrack gang who had attacked him near Epsom with knives. ‘They could have got me, if they’d known anything about trench-fighting. There’s a trick the Canadians were fond of. Like this …’ Whatever we talked about, our conversation returned, inescapably, to the war. Lester, obviously, could speak of nothing else for long.
Lions and Shadows Page 19