A Difficult Young Man

by Martin Boyd

  After this shock the colonel was obliged to reconsider Dominic, who after all was to enter the Army. He did not of course know of the reputation Dominic had amongst the family in Melbourne, the dog’s bad name. The attraction between them, and it must have been to some extent reciprocal, showed its first spark one day at luncheon at Waterpark, when Dominic was down for the week-end. He was then about eighteen and of striking appearance, tall, dark, erect, and with a look of speculation in his eyes which modified his Spanish appearance. When he was old he was so like the El Greco portrait of St Jerome as a Cardinal, that he might have been the model for that painting, though his face was more harrowed. To see Dominic at this age it is only necessary to imagine El Greco’s St Jerome as a boy.

  The scar near his mouth from the wound he received on Mount Wellington may have been an attraction to the colonel. Also Dominic was the only one of us who hunted. Steven said we could not afford both motor-cars and horses, and the former were now a necessity. But as Dominic was to go into the Army, he had to continue riding, so, in spite of Tamburlaine, the situation at Westhill was reversed, and he was the only one of us with a horse. As so often happened with him, necessity confused justice.

  On this day at luncheon, looking across at Dominic, Colonel Rodgers said:

  ‘There must be Spanish blood in your family.’

  He knew perfectly well that there was, because of the same strain in those three Tunstalls, the most distinguished and disreputable members of that family, whose existence he deplored, especially to us who were related to them. This was partly because he though that the glory of connection with the Tunstalls should be his exclusive perquisite, and partly because he did not like to think that the source of his glory was tainted by people of brilliant culture and creative ability.

  ‘I don’t like dagos,’ he said, ‘but there’s something to be said for the Spanish. The bull-fight’s a splendid sport.’

  Dominic looked at him with interest. He was already favourably disposed towards Colonel Rodgers, apart from any instinctive sympathy there might have been between them, because we laughed at him. He was immediately considerate towards figures of fun.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen a bull-fight?’ the colonel said to Steven.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I have,’ said Steven. ‘When we went to Spain, but it was many years ago—about 1892.’

  ‘A fine show.’

  ‘I didn’t care for it very much.’

  ‘Why not?’ snapped the colonel.

  ‘It didn’t seem to me that the bull had much chance.’

  ‘It doesn’t have much chance in the abattoir.’ Extremes meeting, the colonel might almost have found himself on the side of the vegetarians.

  ‘But that’s not a sport,’ objected Steven. ‘I thought no one was in much danger except the horses and the bull.’

  ‘The matador is in great danger, very great danger,’ said Colonel Rodgers crossly. ‘He has to get his sword into that thick muscle at the back of the bull’s neck.’

  ‘Yes, but by that time the wretched animal is so exhausted that he could stick it in anywhere.’

  ‘Not at all. The bull’s still very powerful, and that thick muscle’s very tough.’

  ‘I only saw one bull-fight,’ said Steven diffidently, ‘and the bull appeared to me to be quite exhausted.’

  ‘It’s still dangerous.’

  ‘I believe that in Portugal,’ Steven went on, ‘they put rubber balls on the bull’s horns, and they don’t kill it. I have an idea that they blow a trumpet, and that when the bull hears it he trots obediently out of the arena.’

  I laughed with pleasure at the idea of such a civilized bullfight, as I have always loved those activities in which animals co-operate intelligently with human beings. But these corrupt practices were very repellant to Colonel Rodgers, and he was becoming angry.

  ‘That’s not bull-fighting,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve seen several bull-fights in Spain and the matador has always been in danger. It needs the greatest skill to get his sword into that thick muscle at exactly the right moment. That’s the whole secret of the kill—that thick muscle.’

  He took up his knife and jabbed it down several times at an apple on his plate, as if it were the bull’s thick muscle. He looked as if he were quivering. The prunes had shrunk still further behind his glasses, but they were brighter and blacker. Although he was utterly unlike Dominic, at that moment there was a resemblance between them, as sometimes Dominic also gave the impression of quivering with the intensity of his frustration, and that if one said another faintly irritating word, he would explode into murder.

  Being so worked up, and holding the silver knife suspended in the air, Colonel Rodgers burst into praise of bull-fighting. Oddly he had some literary ability, and in addition to his monographs on Lord Nelson and on the wasps, had written a book about the animals he had killed, which conveyed the atmosphere of the jungle. As he spoke now with a vivacity which he would not normally approve in an English gentleman, he did bring before us the scene in the bull-ring, the brilliant colour, the agile movement, the mass excitement, the blood and the sand. Dominic stopped eating and fixed his eyes on this ant-like apostle of splendour and death.

  There may be a little too much in this book about the repeated patterns of heredity, but after all it is one of its main themes. We find ourselves behaving like our parents or grandparents, and some habit of mind or physical trait which our friends imagine is exclusively our own, may have come to us from a remote ancestor of whom we have never heard. With these things may come also, not a memory, but a kind of spiritual recognition of places or customs which were the circumstances of that ancestor’s life. As I have already stated I have experienced these recognitions, not only of places but of things like plainsong and certain architectural forms. It would be sheer nonsense to pretend that Dominic’s make-up was not largely derived from his Spanish ancestry, and now as he listened to Colonel Rodgers, he seemed to be saying to himself: ‘That is the life! That is what I want to do! That is where I want to be.’ As he was unable to attend bull-fights in Somerset, one might have expected this excited peroration by Colonel Rodgers to have little effect. But it did cement his friendship and admiration for the colonel, and it focused that adolescent enthusiasm through which every youth of spirit must pass. In Brian this enthusiasm was for cricket and painting, in myself for liturgies, in Dominic for weapons of death. Incidentally, this luncheon had an echo a year or two later at Arles.

  The Dower House, apart from the two shrivelled skulls, was decorated almost entirely with weapons. Daggers hung on the walls of the dining-room, swords and spears in the drawing-room, and guns in the hall. There was even a blunderbuss in the downstairs lavatory. As the house was built in the reign of King Henry VII, with low beamed ceilings and small leaded windows, this style of décor was somewhat gloomy and forbidding. After the luncheon I have just described, whenever Dominic came down from London for the week-end or a brief holiday, he went straight across to the Dower House, where he and Colonel Rodgers browsed over the collection of swords, taking them down from the walls and swishing them about. They wrapped themselves in stuffing and slashed at each other with broadswords or lunged with rapiers. Occasionally we heard from the meadow the bark of antique pistols. Laura was rather worried about this excessive use of armaments, and she would have been more so if she had heard Dominic, returning from one of his broadsword bouts, mutter: ‘I’d like to be wounded.’

  This suggests that he was already mad, if he ever was, which we are trying to discover. But his desire to he wounded, expressed in a low, brooding voice, does not necessarily mean that he was masochistic. It may simply have meant that he wanted, like the German students, to bear the outward signs of his courage, in addition to the scar he already had on his cheek, which added to his good looks by drawing attention to the sensuousness of his mouth. Of cours
e, the German students may be a little mad, as it would be far more sensible to have their scars inflicted in a becoming place under an anaesthetic, which in time may be done, in the same way that the monarch gives the poor money instead of washing their feet on Maundy Thursday. Though of course it would then be a denial of their courage, just as the latter custom is the denial of humility, substituting mammon for the imitation of Christ, in one of the most complete and shocking reversals of symbolic meaning that State religion has produced.

  Dominic probably did not know what he meant. If I had said in reply: ‘All right. Let me slash your face,’ he would certainly not have agreed. He was using the wrong words to express feelings which were strong but not articulate, the same feelings that he had when he watched the dying fly, or when he stood by Tamburlaine’s grave. It was a recognition that the violence of his nature caused suffering and death to others, and that he would rather bear it himself. To this extent only was he suicidal or sacrificial. This alternative which faces all of us in some degree, whether to inflict or to endure, may have appeared to him so dreadful that he thought it would be better to cease upon the midnight, with or without pain. If we admit this now, it seems that no further exploration is necessary, but he did not yet know it himself, and we have to learn how, after many years, it came into his conscious mind, and what it did to him. It is even possible that his excitement when his imagination was confronted with the idea of the bull-fight was due to an atavistic response to the idea of the ritual sacrifice which is said to have been the origin of this sport, the primitive gropings towards the sacrifice of a broken and a contrite heart.

  CHAPTER IX

  MY LIFE at Waterpark was not spent in the modern world, not even the modern world of 1907–1911, which now seems sufficiently remote. Mr Woodhall, the vicar and my tutor, was then an old man. In his youth he had known some of the leaders of the Oxford Movement, of whom he spoke with veneration. He wanted to restore the Church of England to its condition in A.D. 1200 except for the Supremacy of the Pope. So did I. He gave me sound instruction in Catholic Theology, but also a great deal of less weighty information about the legality of incense and the use of chasubles. He taught me English history from a Tory angle, and supervised my rather eclectic reading of the English poets. He taught me a little Latin and less Greek, nothing beyond Xenophon and Aristophanes, and he made me read Homer in translation, and that was all. He did not even teach me history after 1745, the date when the last hope of lawful Christian government ended. Last year I heard a woman guide in Louis XV’s bedroom at Versailles declaim passionately: ‘Le passé est un mot vain!’ For Mr Woodhall, on the contrary, the past was the only reality, as it came to be for me.

  I lived in a poetic dream of medievalism. I felt like Marius when, on the mornings of early summer, I walked across the bridge and along the meadow path to the church to serve the Vicar’s Mass, at which I handles the silver cruets and the spotless linen with reverent delight, and performed with as much enthusiasm as Dominic, when he slashed at the colonel with a broadsword, all those gestures which obliterated the disruptive horrors of the Reformation. I was not what is called ‘a wholesome boy,’ and as I came out of church on the morning of St John before the Latin Gate or the translation of St Swithun, as pure and foolish and full of joy as Sir Galahad, I must have appeared a repulsive sight to Colonel Rodgers as I passed his dining-room window where he was standing up to eat his porridge, which no gentleman ever ate seated.

  All the world appeared to me as beautiful as it does to those who have taken the Mexican drug recommended by Mr Aldous Huxley, or as it did to Wordsworth when the waterfall haunted him like a passion. Heaven lay about me and all the primroses were something more. The round pool of shadow under the oak tree was provided by God for the pony who stood there whisking his tail. When I crossed the stream back on to the lawn, it was the stream which flows with silver sound between the wooded banks of Life. The natural world was all evidence of the supernatural, and the Holy Ghost, as Brian would have said, had poured its proper soul into everything. It was hardly a state of mind to appeal to a public-school master, let alone a retired colonel.

  Even so, this state of our perception, when the natural world is the reflection of paradise, when the young men are sparkling angels and the children tumbling jewels, which disappears with our chastity, and we then condemn as romanticism, is the most valuable possession we ever have. In later life there may come at times a similar awareness, but it is only intellectual, not of the spirit, as perhaps when we lie sleepless on a hot Roman night, after a day spent at the Borghese villa or the baths of Diocletian, and our ordinary hand lying on the sheet, because of the statues we have seen appears to be endowed with eternal beauty.

  One result of my preoccupations was that the machinery of reproduction which is implanted in us to disturb and often destroy our lives, in me had its action delayed for another four years, and I told Steven, without any doubt of my ability to maintain my detachment, that I intended to renounce the World, the Flesh and the Devil and become a clergyman. He accepted my choice of a career, but without enthusiasm, and he made jokes about treating Mr Woodhall very carefully, and keeping him alive long enough to enable me to obtain the Waterpark living. But it eased his conscience about letting me stay on at the Vicarage. If I was not going into the world there was no need to give me the rough and tumble education necessary to prepare me for it. Laura was quite pleased for me to become a clergyman, though being brought up in the tradition of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, she did not like my Catholic habits. They liked to have me about the place, as in my joy I saw whence the light flowed, and was full of innocence and pleasure, and was one of the few people in the neighbourhood who could appreciate Steven’s wit. It was rather too sharp for Mr Woodhall, while Colonel Rodgers was hardly endowed with a sense of humour. Of another fox-hunting neighbour Steven said:

  ‘He looks as if he has eaten the very best food for fifty years, but none of it has gone to nourish his brain.’ Even Lord Dilton, with whom he was most friendly, did not follow all his allusions.

  Therefore everything that happened during those years at Waterpark was against the background of the prolonged medieval dream in which I lived, and my portrait of these people must be coloured by my mood, and even that was not constant. I cannot state absolutely and scientifically of what substance they were made. One must remember that their moods also were continually changing, and that it is only possible for me to show them quite truthfully when I catch them in a mood of which the colour is the same as my own. This refers most to my picture of Colonel Rodgers in his association with Dominic. I first see him as I did at the time, but as I continue to write, the adult Poussin glaze, to change the metaphor, modifies my view. On the other hand because of my innocence I may have seen him very clearly, like an innocent old spinster who makes a hardened roué blush, as she does not see the implications of her candid statements, though Sarah I believe who was much given to that kind of thing, did see them and only pretended that she did not know what she was saying, and there may have been something of Sarah’s equivocality in my own behaviour.

  Perhaps in my pure foolishness I was right in my estimate of Colonel Rodgers’s affection, and the glaze will falsify it. He had no children other than his avaricious daughter in India, and like every proper and responsible man he wanted to bring up sons in his own likeness, though at no period would I personally have thought that a desirable thing to do. We suddenly appeared in place of the sons he never had.

  The colonel’s infatuation with Dominic, whatever its nature, together with my Catholic observance, led me to have a little more contact with him. However repugnant I may have been to him, he had to learn from me when Dominic was next coming to Waterpark, which forced him, though an extreme Protestant as that form of religion seemed to him more sympathetic to Old Testament massacres, to buy an Anglo-Catholic calendar, on which he could see the days when I would be coming to serve the
Mass. On my return he would be standing amongst the red unscented flowers, antirrhinums, salvias and geraniums, in the Dower House garden, and call out to me with an affected manly gruffness which revealed rather than concealed his eagerness.

  ‘Yer brother coming down this week?’

  I, a saintly pimp, anxious in my joy to please everyone, would reply explicitly: ‘Yes, sir. He’s coming down on Friday afternoon. The train arrives at four, so he’ll be here to tea.’

  Colonel Rodgers, having obtained this information, immediately appeared bored by it, as if I had been forcing trivial facts on his attention. He bent down and said: ‘Snails are damned bad this morning.’

  But he would turn up at the house, bringing some more dead insects which he used as a kind of entrée card, at about four o’clock on Friday and would of course be asked to stay to tea. When Dominic appeared he would express the greatest surprise. As soon as tea was over (and the colonel would fidget while Dominic, after the austerities of London, would tuck into the rich country food, the hot scones, the cream, the plum cake) they went off together across the meadow to the Dower House, to swish the swords about and let off the guns.