Part 11

This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life, candid, human, extraordinarily real and interesting: their books do not sell in great numbers, but they occupy a place on one's bookshelf that one wants to refer to almost daily. All the other thousand or so novelists don't count at all. I hate the unreality and false glamour of these popular writers: they are like the halfpenny papers which cater for a low and vicious, ignorant taste, only to be compared with the shoddier melodramas that we see on the cinema.

I often wonder how these old ladies get on who crowd daily into Smith's Library in Milsom Street and ask the girl behind the counter for an interesting book. She must have her work cut out to remember the million or so different connotations that the word "interesting" bears to the circulating library subscriber. I wonder how many of them would like to plunge into the inconsequent medley which constitutes my diary. When you see one old lady bearing off under her arm a copy of "The Revelations of a Duchess," Samuel Butler's "Life and Habit," Gertie de S. Wentworth-James's latest narcotic, and some of A. C. Benson's Essays, it almost frights you to think of the aggregate effect of such a mixture. Talk about mixing drinks! The reading habit seems to be ingrained in the British public, but I cannot help wondering how much of the best stuff is ever understood by people who commonly feed on garbage.

I should like to publish a sort of annual guide to be called "The Hundred Best Books of the Year," to be divided up into sections for Parsons, Doctors, Schoolmasters, Socialists, Capitalists, Politicians, Flappers, Nursemaids, Factory Hands, Maiden Aunts, Subalterns, and Young Matrons. I wonder how many would overlap. Not many, I fancy.

I don't think criticisms of books make any appreciable difference to their sale. I have seen heaps of novels, damned by all the papers, go into five or six large editions and others that have been acclaimed as sheer genius die at birth. I wonder, for instance, how many copies of E. C. Booth's "Cliff End" were sold during the first year after its appearance, yet I can't remember any novel which made so deep an impression on me at the time. Yet on every bookstall you see copies of "Paul the Pauper," which every sane man would condemn as simply silly. It has sold over 200,000 copies in two years. It seems incredible: there isn't a single human character in the book, not a single natural sentence: everything is untrue to life in every respect. The passions are laid on with a trowel. There are Grandisonian heroes and double-dyed villains: coincidences of a kind which violate every natural law occur on every other page. The only thing that I can compare to this amazing book is a Lyceum tragedy and the wit of a music-hall comedian. I wonder if England will ever become educated.

From what I have seen of girls in Bath I should say that the system of education in girls' schools is no better than that of boys: they certainly know a little more about English literature, because their mistresses read aloud to them passages out of the novels of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray. They also devote more time to poetry than we do, but they forget it all as soon as they leave school. They don't see that these books taken altogether form a complete introduction to life. The average girl I have danced with lately seems to have read nothing at all. Her conversation invariably runs on the same lines. Have I been in London lately? Don't I just adore Du Maurier and Martin Harvey? Do I rink? Do I hunt? Do I punish my boys very severely? Am I sorry that I am not in the Army? Do I like dancing? Do I like girls? Am I an outrageous flirt? Would I like to sit out somewhere more secluded than this rather open spot? Am I certain that I had enough supper? Isn't the way Jim Dainton and Sophie Harrington are behaving "perfectly disgusting"? Don't I love Irene Fairhaven? Isn't Joyce, or Corelli Windyatt, or Moritz, or Stanislaus Würm, or whoever is playing on this particular evening, divine, topping, ducky, dinky, perfectly sweet, ripping--or whatever the word of the moment is? Shall I be at the Morrisons' on Tuesday or the Dohertys' on Thursday?

I get most infernally tired of all this claptrap. No one ever says anything that he or she means: it is all superficial. The girls think of nothing but their frocks and the effect they are making on their partners. I want to talk sense and instead have to rattle on with sheer nonsense. I suppose I am getting prosy and sedate, but I do just love talking about books and different views on life. I seem to have no ready change of small-talk. Of course one cannot expect to get to know all the people with whom one dances, but this constant chopping and changing is rotten. I want to keep to one girl, Ruth for preference, all through the night. Then one doesn't have to think of something polite to say: if we feel like silence we just keep silent, if we want to talk we talk, about anything that comes into our heads, serious or gay. We understand each other's moods without having to go through a long rigmarole of introductory icebreaking. One great advantage of Bath is the number of clubs and places where one can browse among the reviews and periodicals of all sorts. How I manage to keep abreast of any modern work in a hole like Radchester, I can't think. Without the _Times Literary Supplement_ and the book reviews in the _Telegraph_ and _Morning Post_ I should be entirely at sea. And yet with all these incentives to read, the ignorance of these townspeople is extraordinary. They nearly all rely on their bookseller for everything they read. They leave the choice always to him.

X

_February 23, 1912_

It was appalling to have to leave the comforts of Bath for the wilds of Radchester. It has been the worst Easter term so far within the remembrance of man. We were snowed right up from the beginning and House-fights of snowballing soon ceased to amuse. We are simply shivering in our rooms. The whole place is one medley of germs. Every conceivable sort of contagious disease is raging. It is useless trying to teach anybody anything except individually, for there is no continuity, one boy drops one day, another the next, six more the day after.

I have three in one of my sets where I'm supposed to have twenty-six. I've spent every spare moment in my rooms writing to Ruth, reading and trying my hand at poetry. Thank Heaven, Tony is still immune. He waits for me every night after chapel and we stagger across the snow-bound square with the wind blowing the filthy stuff into our eyes and down our necks and almost into our skins. One misses games in a place like this. I hate letting a day go by without taking violent exercise. I suppose if I were in the City I should be content with Saturday afternoons, but as a schoolmaster I feel that I can't teach and keep healthy unless I need a hot bath in the afternoon. The cold bath in the morning makes me yell with agony these days, but I always keep it up. I suppose it is good for me. At any rate it is refreshing.

Masefield had a new poem in the February number of the _English Review_ called "The Widow in the Bye-Street." All my boys immediately proceeded to copy it. He is certainly virile and unlike anybody else. He makes an irresistible appeal to youth. Of course the outspokenness of his diction accounts for this, at least partially.

Of late I have been sleeping rottenly. I always like to keep my blind up, so that I can hear the waves more clearly and see the sea from my bed. I notice that when the moon is up I get appalling nightmares and wake to find it full on my face. I wonder if I am liable to moonstroke!

We have cleared the snow off some of the ponds and had some really good skating. The most ridiculous rules have been made about it, because two boys were once drowned, a hundred or so years ago. Each House has to take a ladder and a rope with it, and not more than twenty boys are allowed on the same pond at the same time. Considering that none of the ponds is more than two feet deep or ten yards across, such precautions seem rather unnecessary, but nothing can be done at Radchester without rules being framed by the dozen to meet all contingencies. Curiously enough, a tragedy _has_ occurred. The head waiter in Common Room has drowned himself. We spent half of one bitter moonless night searching for his body. He leaves a widow and six children. I wonder why he did it. Was the conversation of the masters altogether too deadly for him? Was he underpaid? or was it just the depressing conditions? I never saw a place which so invited suicidal thoughts. The gloom of this coast at this time of the year is indescribable. All the bungalows down the beach are deserted and so are the little tea-houses which look so jolly in the summer-time. The Head Master has played a low-down, dirty trick on a man called Turner, who only joined us last term. He was quite young, brilliantly clever, popular and successful with the boys: he had to rent a cottage about a quarter of a mile away because he was married and had one baby. His wife was pretty and did a good deal to make the place habitable. One remembered sometimes even the way to take one's hat off. Well, he has had to go. His sin was--being married. The Head Master told him that he had come under false pretences, that the school could not afford to keep men who did not "live in," and that a wife caused a man to neglect his work.

_March 23, 1912_

During the last month or so I have been seized with a panic lest I should die of appendicitis or some such quick and hidden complaint. I can't sleep at all and I lie awake with a curious numb sort of pain and think of death. I am all right in the daytime for the most part. At any rate I am playing hockey and footer with all my old vigour and I never feel bad in form. It's just at night; unfortunately it's every night that I get seized with a real horror lest I should die uncared for, unhonoured and unwept. I should have liked a little taste of love and laughter, of civilized comfort--I should have liked to have written some sort of book which would have helped mankind along the rough road of life. I should like to have had a wife, an heir ... but as it is Tony must be my heir. I have transmitted to him my passionate love of literature, my keenness for beauty, my longing for a revolution in educational practice and theory.

I have worked off my spleen on a long centenary paper on Dickens for the _Radcastrian_, which will excite and annoy the lovers of that novelist a good deal.

I made all the boys in my form write centenary appreciations of Dickens, too. I got some queer stuff. He is not half as well known as he ought to be in spite of his great name. But I do wish he had resisted his tendency to caricature.

There have been the usual rows. By far the most disconcerting was the expulsion of Mather, who was a school prefect and a scholar of Magdalen, for stealing. It seems impossible to believe. It appears that he was in a House where most of the boys have far too much pocket-money: the very fags own to having "fivers." Poor old Mather was one of eight sons of a penniless country parson: he never had a sou and consequently starved when all the rest of the House were revelling in delicacies.

More masters have been poisoning the boys' minds against me. Tony's House-master has been lecturing him about my pernicious influence. I wish I knew what was behind this dark conspiracy. I wish they would give me some facts to go on, and say that just here or just there I was doing harm, but all their accusations are nebulous. Whenever I go up to a man's rooms and beard him in his den, he nearly always denies that he ever said any of the things which were reported of him. It's very difficult to know what to do.

I've discovered another wheeze which I use to get original work out of my form. I give out a list of forty or fifty words, ostensibly for spelling, and by the side of these they write a list of synonyms, and then during their next prep. they weave a story round the words I have given them. I have had wonderful results from this simple device. Incidentally the boys love doing it. It stimulates them, especially when they have to read their own efforts aloud.

Now that the sports are looming ahead, I get up in the very early mornings and take people for training walks. In the afternoon I run with them across country or round the track. Before I came no one worried much about the sports. I have really got them keen this year, much to Hallows' indignation, because as games master he is responsible for the sports, and he thinks I'm taking too much upon myself in training them daily for weeks before the events.

About a dozen of us, Tony and other boys in this House, go off every Sunday to a nook we've found by an inland stream. We call it a training walk: it pans out at twelve miles. By so doing we get right outside the country we know and really begin to get a glimmering of beauty on these glorious warm spring days. It's impossible to imagine now that we were ever snow-bound. It is warm and sunny every day; so much so that "Rugger," and hockey seem indescribably silly games for this time of year. It feels "crickety" weather. I've been writing articles on Hymns and Cross-Country Running for the London Press and had both accepted, which is a bit of luck. Things are looking up. All the same it's a nerve-racking process, waiting to hear one's fate by every post. Editors are as stubborn as mules and without any sense of humanity.

We have had one great excitement lately. A schooner ran ashore just close to my bedroom window and we had to rush out in the middle of the night and rescue people. Poor devils, they were awfully cold and miserable by the time we got them to bed in the sanatorium, but luckily there were no lives lost, and most of the cargo has been salvaged.

Life at the end of the Easter term is fairly brisk. It's impossible to get hold of boys to do anything in the way of extra work owing to the innumerable House competitions. There is the Junior and Senior Hockey, the Singing Competition, the Boxing, the Gym., the Corps and Certificate "A," the Sports, and Heaven knows what besides--and every man on the staff thinks that his pet job is the only one that matters. The only thing about which we are all agreed is that school work does not matter. No one thinks of that. All the same I think these contests are good things, particularly in the Corps, though I object to the extraordinary number of prizes and pots that are lavished upon individual winners. There's a huge element of selfishness inspired by the very things which we hold to eradicate it. I took two days off by going down to Queen's Club to see the Oxford and Cambridge Sports. It was a rare treat to meet all one's best friends of the Oxford days and watch other people in the last stages of nervous funk as we were so few years ago. I went to the dinner afterwards: I wonder whether one will ever grow out of these orgies. They are very life and blood to me now at any rate. I expect our older guests get a trifle tired with the exuberance of our spirits before the end. It was very tame to have to come back to Radchester and the school sports after that grand struggle at Queen's Club.

_April 13, 1912_

Here I am back again in my beloved Bath.

The term ended well. Heatherington's won the sports and I was the recipient of a tremendous ovation at the House Supper. I don't think I ever felt so proud before. At the end of term I went down to Hampton Court with Tony until Good Friday, when I went on to see Ruth: we have spent all the rest of the time together.

It was at the Easter Ball that I saw a face which I shall never forget. I was ragging about with Ruth in the vestibule when I saw a girl at the far end of the room talking to young Conyngham, one of the "nuts" of Bath, whom I cordially dislike. They seemed very pleased with one another. I don't know what came over me but Walter Savage Landor's phrase came into my mind, "By Jove, I'm going to marry that girl," and before I knew what I was doing I had left Ruth and raced across to Conyngham and asked him to introduce me to his partner. He was really bored. She was not pleased. Apparently he realized that I meant to stay there till he did introduce me and so he gruffly mumbled, "Oh! This is Mr. Traherne--Miss Tetley," and walked away about two yards. "Don't go away, Philip," she said, in a voice that thrilled me to hear.

"May I----?" I began.

"I'm afraid I've only got number 17 left."

"May I have that--and any extras?"

"If you like--I'm afraid I didn't hear your name."

"Traherne. Patrick Traherne--let me write it for you."

I did and received instant dismissal. Not a promising start, but I was pleased just to get so much out of her. All the evening, as I was gallivanting round with Ruth, I kept on looking at her, but she had no eyes for me. I asked Ruth about her, but she was not interested.

"Which girl? Oh, that one. I don't know her except by sight. Her name's Elspeth Tetley. Rather ugly, don't you think? Her name I mean. No: she's a pretty enough little thing in herself. She seems very fond of Mr. Conyngham."

Yes, she did--confound her. Incidentally, she cut my dance and there were no extras, so I did not see her again that night. I wasn't going to be defeated so easily, so I bowed to her when I passed her in the streets, but she never even saw me. I don't quite know what it is about her that so attracts me; she looks very quiet, she is amazingly sure of herself, extraordinarily pretty, with any amount of humour and energy I should think. I am still speaking without the book, for I know nothing about her, whatever, except that I love the look of her.

Ruth and I have spent all the holidays so far watching "Rugger" matches and picnicking and motoring and dancing. I have had Petre Mais down to stay with me. By a strange chance he knows the Tetleys: he thinks Elspeth, as he calls her (he has known her from childhood), the most adorable girl he has ever met. I have tried to get him to bring her along to see me, but something has always cropped up at the last moment to prevent our meeting.

_May 3, 1912_

I spent the whole of the Easter holidays in Bath, mainly in the company of Ruth. It was good to have Mais with me: we used to sit up to all hours arguing about education: we appear to be both of us bitten with the craze of reform, though we don't agree on points of detail. He is a curious mixture of the very grave and sedate and the irresponsibly gay. He gets on extraordinarily well with my father. While I am disporting myself in company with Ruth, he takes the Gov'nor for long walks and argues about Christian dogma and ethics. I am afraid that Ruth interferes with my reading and writing. Mais seems to get through a great deal and always "twits" me with being a lady-killer: he never seems to want the companionship of the other sex. There is Elspeth Tetley, with whom he might spend days--she is obviously very fond of him--and instead of going about with her he gives her up to Conyngham and buries himself in the Church Institute or the Bath and County Club, getting up notes for some article or book that he is at work upon. He is never happy unless he is working. As he very truly says, "his work is his mistress and he never wants a better." All the same a man needs some relaxation. I find mine in the company of Ruth, who grows more alluring with every passing day. She has taken me to Bradford-on-Avon, to Englishcombe, by motor to Badminton and over Salisbury Plain. I have been to three point-to-point meetings and at each of them caught a fleeting glance of Elspeth Tetley. She was always surrounded by young men, so I couldn't speak to her. I love these country meetings more almost than any other form of sport. The hazardous steeplechases fill one with excitement: many men were riding whom I knew at Oxford, but they all appeared to belong to sets of the most exclusive kind. There is always a plentiful sprinkling of dukes and duchesses at these shows, as well as all the farmers in the country and the riff-raff of the town. The procession of bicycles and governess-cars and dog-carts and motors and pedestrians miles out in the country is a fine sight. I should like to have enough money to be able to go in for steeplechasing: it must be one of the finest sensations in the world to feel yourself rushing through the air, jumping these brooks and thickset hedges, always risking your neck, while all the youth and beauty of the country watch you, heart in mouth lest you should take a toss, transported beyond belief when you ride past the post a winner. Elspeth Tetley somehow fits a point-to-point meeting exactly. Some girls look the most preposterous idiots all togged up in the serviceable tweeds and brogues that girls wear for these shows, but she looks just as divine at a race meeting as she does in a ballroom. I hope to Heaven I get the chance of meeting her again some day.

_June 10, 1912_

I hated leaving Bath more than ever this time, partly because it meant leaving Elspeth in the clutches of young Conyngham, partly because of the summer weather and the flowers and the comfort of the south, partly because of parting with Ruth, but mainly because of the horrid contrast. Who, for instance, in Common Room ever rides to hounds, or cares about point-to-point meetings? Not one of my colleagues ever goes near a dance if he can get out of it. I wonder how they all spend their holidays. As a consequence of my depression it took me longer than usual to settle down this term. I had a bad fit of restlessness, a feeling that I ought to be out in the world, risking something, trying to make money out of rubber in the Malay, or jute in India, experiencing the ups and downs of life in America, Spain, China, Russia, anywhere where men really lived. There is no denying that we do tend to stagnate here. This incessant round of cricket, bathing, maths., English, prep., chapel, and roll isn't fit work for an able-bodied man of active brain and ambition. The ideal schoolmaster has to put away ambition from the start. He can never set the Thames on fire or cause his name to ring out through the ages: it is enough for him if a score of men go through life blessing him for what he taught them, but a boy's memory is very short: he soon forgets his masters when he gets out into the real world and little wonder. I've been going into Scarborough lately and trying to find an interest in watching the trippers, but I hate the north-country people now. Bath has spoilt my taste for them for ever. I hate their raucous laughter, their dirty teeth, their loud ingurgitations over their food, their louder clothes and ghastly sense of independence, though as a Socialist I ought, I suppose, to be thankful for the last.

I have had an offer to sub-edit a rather pleasant monthly called the _Scrutinator_. I nearly accepted it. I don't know what held me back unless it was Tony. I hate the thought of life without him, though of course he will leave just as other good fellows have left and I shall have to find some new friend and confidant.

We have had a wedding here, an unheard-of thing at Radchester. The Bursar is leaving, and so has decided to do what he wouldn't be allowed to do if he remained and that is to take a wife.