Part 19

I always return from a holiday in the West Country a different man. On this occasion as the result Tony wrote some wonderfully descriptive verses and three short stories, and I was inspired to begin my first novel. I am not satisfied with it, because as usual I have hurried through it far too quickly, my characterization is not sound, my protagonists have simply run away with me. I start off by meaning to say one thing and then end up by saying something quite different. I cannot visualize scenes accurately: I give a hazy, vague impression like a man who never keeps his eye on the object. I have often, for instance, tried since I have been at Marlton to describe the school, the Priory, or the town, but I have never succeeded in pleasing myself with the result. The town to me is just a cluster of beautiful old houses set in a picturesque valley flanked with wooded hills; the Priory which stands in the midst defies description. I know that when I get inside I gaze at the thin perpendicular pillars, the ornate ceiling, the many coloured stained-glass windows, the slender beauty of the whole, but I cannot get the impression it makes upon me into words: the school is simply an Oxford College with lime-trees in the quadrangle and latticed windows to its studies and no more. I can't paint what it looks like on a clear moonlight night, or when the lights shine through the rain on to the puddles in the main courts.... So it is with Devon and Cornwall: their very names ring in my ears like some magic phrase, but I can't explain the fascination these counties have for me.

It is all rather a tragedy for me, for a man who cannot see or describe accurately can scarcely expect to become a writer, and I am almost as keen to bring out a great book as I am to be a great schoolmaster. The tragedy lies even deeper, for I fail even in my calling. I want to be able to plant my finger on abuses and rid the world of them, and I find I am simply in my hurry destroying the wheat with the tares and bringing the whole edifice of education about my ears with no definite constructive theory about the rebuilding. I love boys but I don't attract many but the outcasts. During the time that I have been at Marlton I have only got to know at the outside a dozen intimately, and I don't know that my influence on these has been wholly good. I rouse in them a spirit of criticism and get them to refuse to believe anything until they have proved it for themselves. I have made enemies of practically all the staff, all of whom are better fellows than I am and do more good with less effort. I seem to be the Martha of my profession, cumbered about with too much serving, always thinking that I am the only one who is really working because I kick up such a fuss about it.

I seem to have been like this in everything that I have undertaken. When I was married, I considered that I was the only man who had ever had to learn by experience the laws that govern marriage, when Prunella was born I imagined myself to be the only father in the world. I suppose I do feel joys and miseries more acutely than most people. The smallest kindness shown me makes me almost worship the doer of it; the least hint of inimical criticism and I am up in arms in a moment and consider myself the most badly treated man on the face of the earth. It is awful to have to face oneself and write oneself down as self-centred, narrow, anarchical, selfish, and all the rest of it. At any rate those friends I have, have clung to me through thick and thin, and Elspeth has been a brick to stick to me as she has. I made her come up to town to see Tony before he went back to France and to buy some new clothes. I am so proud of her these days that I want to dress her smartly, give her none but the best things to wear, entertain her to all the amusements that are going. She loves London; the shops and restaurants and theatres all provide her with a never-failing source of interest. Besides which it is necessary to have a fling in the big world before we retire to our backwater at Marlton: it is all very well for me, but there is nothing for her to do there but tend Prunella.

_December 19, 1916_

This Christmas term has passed all too quickly. Elspeth has been wrapped up in Prunella and watches her growth with ever-increasing delight. I see the infant in the early morning and talk to her while I am shaving: she is now cutting teeth and doing her level best to talk. Her remarks at present consist of "Gug-gug-Da-da," and incomprehensible noises pitched high and low in the scale: she laughs like a grown-up person: she only cries when the piano is being played or the gramophone put on. She lies and kicks in her cot, her pram or arm-chair by the hour: she is quite contented crooning and laughing to herself. She wriggles her hands and toes about incessantly and is as bad as any animal about her bottle: her eyes dilate with fury if it is delayed, and with pleasure when it appears. Her interest in everything that goes on is positively comic: she is afraid of nothing except sudden noises and allows herself to be handled by any stranger. All the masters' wives love her: she must be really a beauty because every one is agreed about it. I think her eyes are lovely and her contentment is a thing to marvel at. The patience required for lying for months trying to learn to talk, with teeth slowly coming, hair slowly growing, strength gradually being built up, must be immense. Her intuition is perhaps the most noticeable thing about her: she knows when she is being "ragged," she knows somehow exactly what it is that people are trying to convey to her, and she answers any one's smile with a beautiful grin which is entirely her own. She is, however, a complete deterrent to work. I always want to be with her, to have her on my lap and pet her, but I curb my desires strictly. After all, I've got my writing to attend to, Sybil to teach, the boys' work to correct and games to referee. My novel appeared in the autumn and to my intense surprise went into a second edition almost at once: the critics were unanimous and loud in their praise, which astonished me, for it seemed to me to lack any kind of pretensions to style, clarity, cohesion, or even sense. None the less the writing of books is not a paying game. An article brings in quick returns, costs very little energy, and is not at all wearing to the nervous system. After finishing my first book I was a wreck.

Spurred on by the success of this I have already written another in imitation of the younger novelists of the day, in which I have portrayed a horrible character obsessed by sex: I don't quite know why: the writing of it affected me greatly and I am as limp as a rag now it is done, and want to burn it, but my publisher is delighted with it and wants to bring it out in the spring. For the sake of the money I suppose I must let it go. Fortune seems to be smiling on me. Another publisher has already made me sign contracts for two novels and a volume of my collected poems, so I have my work cut out in the near future to cope with the demand. Added to this, the best-known literary agent in the country has now approached me and asked me to let him place all my work. All the agents I have tried hitherto have failed me hopelessly, but it is an honour to have Harrod for an agent, I am told, so I have signed his agreement too. The only fly in the ointment is that there is a great scarcity of paper and trouble in the printing trade; still, people are reading books more than ever. I shall never forget the day when I first saw a book of mine in the window of a London book-shop. Fame (of a sort) I felt had at last reached me. Three years ago I should never have dreamt such a thing possible, and my little notoriety has already brought me great friends.

When the Christmas term is over we are to spend some days with quite a number of leading literary lights, to whose conversation I am looking forward. Common Room were incensed at my book because they thought that they detected pictures of themselves. I can't for the life of me think where, for the characters were all weaved entirely out of my own brain. Apparently some of the opinions I put into the mouths of my worst characters have been taken literally as my own, which is pernicious nonsense. I should have thought after all this time that most people here would know what ideals I stand for. As a matter of fact no one has lately taken much trouble to cultivate the acquaintance either of Elspeth or myself. They look on me as eccentric, they have not worried to sympathize with me over my troubles and I am afraid that they think that Elspeth does not want to know them because she goes out so seldom. We live very much to ourselves. It is hard to see how we could do otherwise when one realizes how we spend each day. I have to go on writing most of the time to earn our daily bread: we haven't a penny private means. We are not very economical, though we try hard to be so, and prices are steadily rising.

I have had one bit of luck, however. I have been appointed Examiner for the Oxford and Cambridge Locals in Mathematics and English, and though the work entails a good deal of drudgery, it also makes an appreciable difference to our income. Incidentally I very much like going through English essay and literature questions. I like to compare all the different methods of teaching English that obtain throughout the country.

The term has passed without incident: Sybil has learnt a good deal of history and written some excellent short stories. Boys come up to borrow books and to discuss problems that worry them. I have had no occasion to punish any boy for some time. Old Boys come back frequently and keep us reminded that after all there is a war on, which we are apt to forget when we have a petty feud of our own raging. I have refereed a good deal of "footer," and struggled hard to keep my platoon up to the mark. The only complaint I have about life is that the days are too short and I want to do far more than I can.

_January 19, 1917_

We spent a splendid holiday in London going from house to house of new friends and seeing for the first time how the artistic and literary section of London live. They are very different from the Marlton people: their codes are much less stringent, they are far more tolerant, they seem to get much more out of life. They are intensely interested in art, painting, sculpture, music, the drama, and all æsthetic delights. Elspeth was taken up at once by them: she has the sort of uncommon beauty that passes more or less without comment in Marlton but in London is looked upon with admiration. She seems much healthier and more vivacious in town: the life agrees with her. I spent some days with her at Bath and some quietly in St. John's Wood, writing for dear life at one of my new novels for Manson. The worst of novel-writing is that it gives one no time at all for articles and the money one derives from it does not come in for so long a time after. I am told that the book writer achieves a kudos which the mere short-story and article writer never gets. I doubt it, but it may be so. Anyway I doubt whether I shall write many books, the wastage of nervous tissue is too great. While I am at work on a subject I want to go on and on at lightning speed until I have finished, and when I have finished I am perilously near lunacy.

_February 10, 1917_

A frightful blow has befallen us. I have been turned out of Marlton for writing my second novel. I am to leave at the end of the term. So after eight years I am thrown out of my profession: a quaint finish for the overkeen enthusiast. I quite see that I was a fool to write it. It was all owing to my unreasonable haste. I spoke out too plainly: I didn't condemn my villain enough or show the hatred I bear to vice. It is useless to explain now: all the pent-up fury of those who imagine themselves injured by me has broken out and I am overwhelmed. I was supposed to be taking part in a play that the school and town were getting up in aid of the hospital and I was requested to resign my part because no one would act in it if I persisted in going on. I have been lectured by heaps of my junior colleagues here as if I had committed a most heinous crime. I don't quite know what to make of it all. That the book is a bad one I can scarcely doubt, for the critics have been as unanimous in their condemnation of it as they were unanimous in praising my first. I must be much madder than I thought I was, because I still fail to see why my influence, which was generally allowed to be on the side of the angels, should suddenly become malign and foul because I create foul characters in a book.

I could wish that some of my enemies could have seen my further work, for I have now two more novels written, which can scarcely appear for a year at least. It is all horrible. I can't bear to contemplate cutting myself off from the society of boys. Before I married they meant everything in the world to me and now they come after Elspeth and Prunella.

I have passed through troublous years of late which have tainted my brain: I might have become sane again in time, but now all is darkness and I have nothing further to look forward to. Each hour of class brings me nearer to my last one and it is all I can do to keep from crying aloud. At least I will spend my remaining days in trying to keep the beacon bright in my boys' eyes. I have always regarded the schoolmaster's as the most responsible position in the kingdom: these boys sitting under me to-day will help to control the Empire to-morrow. Am I leading them to see that corruption, vice, intolerance and bigotry are deadly sins and that disinterestedness, virtue, tolerance and active sympathy are the weapons they must learn to use in their fight to build the New Jerusalem in England? I have to rouse them from their lethargy, to make them wild crusaders, caring for nothing but the future prosperity of their country. I have so little time left to do it and so much to do. The days pass with frightful rapidity. Elspeth has been up to London searching for a flat for us to live in, and after an arduous and protracted journeying she has eventually discovered a small but comfortable ground-floor apartment in Maida Vale.

So now nothing remains but to finish the term out, pack up and go. I have been searching for work but there does not seem anything vacant just at present. It is no light thing at my age suddenly to throw up the profession one has adopted and to begin again. Education was my one great passion in life. I can never hope to be a great writer. The future is black: I dare not contemplate it. There are still, however, thank God, some weeks to go.

_April 3, 1917_

My last term as a Public School master is over. How I managed to get through the last few hours in school without breaking down I don't know. Luckily no one knows the agony I feel. Several, the majority of people, think that I am leaving of my own free will in order to be at liberty to write: the irony of that is laughable. I would give my whole soul to continue to my life's end as a teacher of youth: I have loved my work with a passion I could never transfer to anything else. I have made endless mistakes. I have gone too fast: I have treated growing boys as if they were grown up: I have not always given my colleagues their due in my intolerance of lukewarmness. I have always worshipped energy, and energy has been my ruin. I have never been able to curb my tongue or my enthusiasm nor to stifle my opinion. The grass has grown over the grave of my ambitions at Radchester and I am by now forgotten as a breath of wind that once passed over, so will it be at Marlton in a term or so. All my ardour gone for nothing, my strenuous ideals broken, my office another man will take and Marlton will be at peace again.

Regrets I know to be vain, tears wasteful. The decree has gone forth against me and I must abide by it.

But after all, "There is a world elsewhere!" Marlton is somewhat of a backwater, the waters here run very sluggishly. I want more scope; once I am in the great world again I shall quickly recover my sense of perspective and come to regard this place in its true light. My four years' experience here has been most valuable, but the secret of success in life is to keep moving. A rolling stone may gather no moss, but it does "see life." At any rate I am saved from sinking into a groove. To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new.

The meaning of life, as Tchekov says, is to be found only in one thing--fighting. To get one's heel on the vile head of the serpent and to crush it.... If one has made a mistake and lost faith in one idea, one may find another.

I have still got what I would not barter for anything in heaven or earth, and that is the love of Elspeth.

So long as she remains mine I can defy the world, I am happy. Pray God she will never desert me and turn me out as Marlton has, for without her I have no sun, no moon, no reason for being. She possesses me heart and soul. I only wish she could ever realize a millionth part of what she means to me.

APPENDIX

_I have thought it good, for the sake of those who have somehow missed Patrick Traherne's published work, which he produced under a variety of pseudonyms and initials (G. K., J. B., A. C. B., and K. R., being his favourites), to append a fragment here of a book which he never finished._

_It was to be called "The Future of the Boy," but I have been unable to find more than the Prologue and Epilogue: he wrote to me on several occasions asking advice on technical points, and I had gathered from these letters that he was well under way with the book (which was obviously to be his "magnum opus") when all writing had to cease. I fear that he must have destroyed the manuscript in a moment of depression, probably on the day when he received his dismissal from Marlton. I guess, however, that he could not bring himself to burn his Prologue and Epilogue even though he became too inert to try to publish them. I am the more pleased, therefore, to be allowed the privilege of giving publicity for the first time to two of the most remarkable papers on education I have ever read. That they are immature and in many respects false is at once obvious; they only touch, too, on the intellectual side of school life, the importance of which he always overemphasized; but they are stimulating, controversial, and interesting._

_I shall be amply repaid if the result of my labours is to send such readers back to his earlier work, where they may discover for themselves some of the myriad problems that vex the practical educationalist, and at the same time learn more of his theories for reforming the abuses which block up the path to progress._

PROLOGUE

_Why do not English boys care for learning?_

LORD BRYCE (January 3, 1914).

MODERN SHELL: TO-DAY

The boy's first intimation that a new day of miserable waste has begun is received by the clanging in his ears of a discordant bell by a man servant, whose sole claim to attention in these pages is that he also acts as the senior boys' bookmaker's agent, and supplier of cigarettes, tobacco, matches and pipes at a rate highly profitable to himself. The compulsory bath over (no boy would wash unless he was compelled, that is an idea that you who live on adages and saws which are one tissue of lies will find it hard to believe, but it is true), after the compulsory bath, I say, he hurries into his clothes, dashes downstairs and just gets to the chapel as the doors close behind him. The service need not be given in detail: it is merely a roll-call with a little music thrown in; the boys are ardently urged to join in the responses or psalms, sometimes with threats, but except on Sundays no part whatever is taken by the congregation in the service. They mark with satisfaction that their form master has noted their presence and then proceed with their disturbed slumbers, unless the youth on their right or left has some racy story or spicy bit of news to impart, or there is some friend across the gangway of the aisle at whom they wish to gaze, not being permitted by law to speak owing to disparity of age. The fascination of the loved face grows and the service becomes interesting until the Head Master's eye, ever roving, searching for evil, lights on these two: they blush, hide their faces under a pretence of praying, and march out; the service is over. A scamper ensues towards the classrooms for the most hated and slackest school of the day: that on an empty stomach before breakfast.

The scene is an ill-lighted, cobweb-ridden, white-wash-walled, low-ceilinged room, fitted with old oak desks, on which are carved many thousands of initials and into which several obscene remarks are deeply inked; long low benches without backs incite the boys to lounge forward with bent shoulders; there is no relief on any of the walls to hide the hideous plaster except a map of Palestine dated 1871.

The blackboard is rough and cracked, and whatever writing is inscribed on it is indiscernible when the lights are on.

The door has just been unlocked, a grey-haired portly man in an M.A. gown lets the flood of sombrely-clad louts of seventeen and eighteen rush past the Eton-collared, more brilliant youngsters of fourteen, so that they may secure the place nearest to the pipes, or sit in remote corners with their backs against the wall, covered by the form in front from any possible detection.

The master makes his way to his desk, sits down and raps out suddenly:

"Stop talking there; how many times have I told you to stop talking as soon as you come into the room? Harrison minor, are you _still_ conversing? Thank you, thank you for your momentary attention. If you will be so good as to bring me the last three hundred lines of the Fourth Æneid on Thursday, second school, we shall be, I think, at one again. Shut your books. Write out the Rep." Silence then follows, except for the scraping of pens, the dropping of books and mathematical instruments, and the whispered monotone of one boy who is copying it straight from the book on to the paper. Several others after a time, at a loss how to continue, peer gently over their neighbours' shoulders and, enlightened, proceed.

One of the bigger boys, more muscular but even less intellectual than the rest, produces a paper-covered novel of Mr. Nat Gould from his pocket and proceeds to read with some fervour when he has copied his repetition: two others are engaged in an acrimonious conversation, "You ---- young swine, I'll damned well lick you after for that. Blast you, take your arm away, I can't see a word you've written."

"I say, your crowd were a lot of stumors yesterday; so you thought you were the House for the 'pot.' My God! Talk about swank!"... And so on, until the master who has hurriedly been correcting some analysis, which the form wished to have back (this is an English lesson, by the way) suddenly raises his head, apparently having heard and seen nothing, and says, "Anybody finished yet? Ah! you have, Dixon. Now hurry up, the rest of you; I've a lot to do to-day," and then breathlessly he turns to his corrections again, until he has done, then calling the nearest boy to him tells him to give out the corrected papers. "By the way, we'll correct that Rep. you've just done. I'll read it out to you. Four marks a line and one off for every word wrong--"

"_Anon the great San Philip she bethought_ ..."

He wheezes the noble poem out in lines like so many rashers of bacon, gives the form a moment's respite in which to add (which they do very generously to themselves) the number of marks. He then proceeds to give a long disquisition on adjectival adjuncts and subordinate clauses. "Surely, Morgan, your knowledge of the Latin tongue should have shown you that----"

A school messenger interrupts.