by H. G. Wells
"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith.
"We don't want to give ourselves away."
"I vote we ask old Topham to see us through," said Naylor.
Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. "Greek epigrams
on the fellows' names," he said. " Small beer in ancient bottles.
Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."
"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington. "One in
each number. It-it impresses parents and keeps up our classieal
tradition. And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise
them. Of course-we've got to dcpartmentalise. Writing is only one
section of the thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand for the school.
There's questions of space and questions of expense. We can't turn
out a great chunk of printed prose like-like wet cold toast and
call it a magazine."
Britten writhed, appreciating the image.
"There's to be a section of sports. YOU must do that."
"I'm not going to do any fine writing," said Shoesmith.
"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note
to their play:-'Naylor minor must pass more. Football isn't the
place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-
back.' Things like that."
"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and
manifestly hecoming pregnant with judgments.
"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington,
"is to mention just as many names as you can in each number. It
keeps the interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their
own little bit. Then it all lights up for them."
"Do you want any reports of matches?" Shoesmith broke from his
meditation.
"Rather. With comments."
"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home,"
said Shoesmith.
"Shut it," said Naylor modestly.
"Exactly," said Cossington. "That gives us three features,"
touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram, Literary Section,
Sports. Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a
notice of anything that's going on. So on. Our Note Book."
"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent
disapproval of every one.
"Then we want an editorial."
"A WHAT?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror in his voice.
"Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front
page. It gives a scrappy effect to do that. We want something
manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism,
say, or ESPRIT DE CORPS, or After-Life."
I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington
mattered very much in the world.
He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. There was a sort of
energy about him, a new sort of energy to us; we had never realised
that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly
at a disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and
detailed vision of a magazine made up of everything that was most
acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about
us, and had determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of
instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every successful
magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life.
He was elected at his own suggestion managing director, with the
earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine
so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page
of advertisements from the big sports shop in Holborn, and made the
printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their
own which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up
space. The only literary contribution in the first number was a
column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of
some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that
noble old quotation:-
"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."
And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on
the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely
thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School
Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."
Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any
grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
ADOLESCENCE
1
I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and
interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-
deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints,
its subtle explications to the growingunderstanding. Day after day
the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every
morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I
started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the
factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of
subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the
nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his
dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first
intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused
avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by
such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously
crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must
be. One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of
blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home
a thing eternal, and "beinggood" just simple obedience to
unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of
one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of
partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and
distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad
prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.
I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by
night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic
contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of
appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in
receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood
succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an
utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its
necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite
space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the
pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of
reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now
irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these
broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.
Life crowded me away from it.
I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that
passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for
some permanently sati
sfyingTruth. That, too, ceased after a time
to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that
endures to this day, of absolutetranquillity, of absolute
confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which
must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT,
feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite
clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days
were done. Iam sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite
like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father
and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must
needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but
failure, no promise but pain…
But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was
comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies
of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that
it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early
training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant
thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of
life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was
never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the
Victorian time…
I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found
inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I
knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to
keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for
all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my
upbringing…
The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle
and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first
intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life.
As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those
gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously
and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a
shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them…
The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to
me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that
strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced
me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say
blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by
shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an
ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like
a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was
indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead
there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a
new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the
twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of
the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather
than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
picture.
All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked
avoided chamber…
It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down
the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret
broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged
suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I
can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative
talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted
Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but
we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,
if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's
rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and
deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings-
he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it-and a huge French
May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on
a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the
floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face
downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and
our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like
an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of
mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from
his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,
except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank
a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk,
and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,-there was a transient
fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was
responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to
conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away
from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the
instructive knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman
of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice
and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one
evening-Heaven knows how we got to it-" Look here, you know, it's
all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We OUGHT to talk about them.
What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all
festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much
Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"
We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was
clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember
Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and
Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought
them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and
the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.
And all that sort of thing."
Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually
wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of
those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for
decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the
less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of
India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and
Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-
town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was
too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and
his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together,
carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the
monasteries of Thibet.
"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an
intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."
We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and
tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and
dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this
&n
bsp; spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it
makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things,
until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or
think-even think! until it leads to our coming to-to the business
at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of
dirty jokes and, and "-he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch
his image in the air-" oh, a confounded buttered slide of
sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and
talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at
present. I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You
men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and
marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.
You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly,
sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like-like Cambridge
humorists… I mean to know what I'm doing."
He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But
one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than
one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not
know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. Iam,
however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were
pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common
property of our set was developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid
down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there
were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and
the man who subdues his mind to other people's.
"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory
tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to
run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to he able to think
of anything. And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's
another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.
If we see fit, that is."
A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.
"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are
we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't
to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these
extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we