Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (18 page)

Long afterwards, Victor told me that Roland had once remarked, with the dramatic emphasis inherited from his family, that he could wish for no better end than to be found dead in a trench at dawn.

After dinner he took us to His Majesty’s Theatre to see Sir Herbert Tree’s production of
David Copperfield
. No doubt this performance was most spectacular, but though I apparently witnessed the whole of it, I was hardly conscious even of the changes of scene. In one interval, I whispered to Roland how much I had liked his mother.

‘She thought you the most charming girl she had ever met!’ he told me enthusiastically.

‘Oh, I’m
so
relieved!’ I exclaimed. ‘You don’t know
what
I should have felt like if she’d disliked me!’

‘I knew she wouldn’t,’ he observed reassuringly. ‘I knew just what she would think - her tastes are very much the same as mine . . .’

‘Sh-h—!’ reprimanded our unsympathetic neighbours as the curtain went up.

At Charing Cross, with half an hour to wait for the last train to Purley, we walked together up and down the platform. It was New Year’s Eve, a bright night with infinities of stars and a cold, brilliant moon; the station was crowded with soldiers and their friends who had gathered there to greet the New Year. What would it bring, that menacing 1915?

Neither Roland nor I was able to continue the ardent conversation that had been so easy in the theatre. After two unforgettable days which seemed to relegate the whole of our previous experience into a dim and entirely insignificant past, we had to leave one another just as everything was beginning, and we did not know - as in those days no one for whom France loomed in the distance ever could know - when or even whether we should meet again. Just before the train was due to leave I got into the carriage, but it did not actually go for another ten minutes, and we gazed at one another submerged in complete, melancholy silence.

My aunt, intending, I suppose, to relieve the strain - which must certainly have made the atmosphere uncomfortable for a third party - asked us jokingly: ‘Why don’t you say something? Is it too deep for words?’

We laughed rather constrainedly and said that we hoped it wasn’t as bad as all that, but in our hearts we knew that it was just as bad and a great deal worse. The previous night I had become ecstatically conscious that I loved him; on that New Year’s Eve I realised that he, too, loved me, and the knowledge that had been an unutterable joy so long as any part of the evening remained became an anguish that no words could describe as soon as we had to say good-bye.

The New Year came in as I sat in the train, trying to picture the dark, uncertain future, and watching the dim railway lights in a blurred mist go swiftly by. When at last I was alone in my bedroom, the tears that had blurred the lights fell unrestrainedly upon the black book to which I had confided so much repressed bitterness, so many private aspirations. It was now to receive a secret of a more primitive kind, for I wrote in it that I would gladly give all that I had lived and hoped for during my few years of conscious ambition, not, for the first time, to astonish the world by some brilliant achievement, but one day to call a child of Roland’s my own.

8

After all, I saw him again quite soon.

But first there came a letter telling me that he too had witnessed, not without emotion, the coming of 1915.

‘When I left you I stood by the fountain in Piccadilly Circus to see the New Year in. It was a glorious night, with a full moon so brightly white as to seem blue slung like an arc-lamp directly overhead. I had that feeling of extreme loneliness one is so often conscious of in a large crowd. There was very little demonstration; two Frenchmen standing up in a cab singing the “Marseillaise”; a few women and some soldiers behind me holding hands and softly humming “Auld Lang Syne”. When twelve o’clock struck there was only a little shudder among the crowd and a distant muffled cheer and then everyone seemed to melt away again, leaving me standing there with tears in my eyes and feeling absolutely wretched.’

The letter ended with half a dozen little words which, for all their gentle restraint, once more transformed speculation into bright, sorrowful certainty.

‘You are a dear, you know.’

The next day, in church, Cowper’s hymn, ‘God moves in a mysterious way’, so often sung during the War by a nation growing ever more desperately anxious to be reassured and consoled, almost started me weeping; as I listened with swimming eyes to its gentle, melodious verses, I wondered whether I should ever have sufficient understanding of the world’s ironic pattern to be able to accept the comfort that they offered:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy, and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.

Blind unbelief is sure to err,
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.

For the first time, too, I began to realise that love, in addition to its heights and depths, had also its inconveniences. Thoughts of Roland were certainly not conducive to solid work for Pass Mods.; ‘I may write the better novels some day for a little passionate experience,’ I observed ruefully, ‘but I do not think the inspiration will run in the direction of Latin proses.’

The prospects of the proses were not improved when there came, in almost his next letter, the exciting suggestion that if I could go back to Oxford for the Easter term
via
London or Leicester, he would invent an excuse to get a day’s leave from Peterborough and meet me. Instead of giving my mind to Pliny and Plato, I spent the best part of a week in carefully arranging to carry out this plan without arousing suspicion at home.

Sophisticated present-day girls, free immediately after leaving school to come and go as they wish, or living, as independent professional women, in their own rooms or flats, have no conception of the difficulties under which courtships were conducted by provincial young ladies in 1915. There was no privacy for a boy and girl whose mutual feelings had reached their most delicate and bewildering stage; the whole series of complicated relationships leading from acquaintance to engagement had to be conducted in public or not at all.

Before the War, the occupations, interests and most private emotions of a young woman living in a small town were supervised from each day’s beginning to its end, and openly discussed in the family circle. Letters were observed and commented on with a lack of compunction only to be prevented by lying in wait for the postman with an assiduity that could not be permanently maintained under a system of four posts a day. The parental habit - then almost universally accepted as ‘correct’ where daughters were concerned - of inquisition into each day’s proceedings made private encounters, even with young men in the same town, almost impossible without a whole series of intrigues and subterfuges which robbed love of all its dignity.

With men living in other places, unobserved meetings were hardly feasible at all. The shortest railway journey to an unspecified destination for an unrevealed purpose was outside the bounds of possibility. Before I went up to Oxford I had never even spent a day in Manchester without being accompanied by my mother or a reliable Buxton resident. On all my longer journeys I was seen off at the station, had my ticket purchased for me, and was expected to send a telegram home immediately on arrival, the time of which was carefully looked up beforehand. In these requirements my parents were not exceptional; they merely subscribed to a universal middle-class tradition.

At the beginning of 1915 I was more deeply and ardently in love than I have ever been or am ever likely to be, yet at that time Roland and I had hardly been alone together, and never at all without the constant possibility of observation and interruption. In Buxton our occasional walks had always been taken either through the town in full view of my family’s inquisitive acquaintances, or as one half of a quartette whose other members kept us continually in sight. At Uppingham every conversation that we had was exposed to inspection and facetious remark by schoolmasters or relatives. In London we could only meet under the benevolent but embarrassingly interested eyes of an aunt. Consequently, by the middle of that January, our desire to see one another alone had passed beyond the bounds of toleration.

In my closely supervised life, a secret visit to London was impossible even
en route
for Oxford; I knew that I should be seen off by a train which had been discussed for days and, as usual, have my ticket taken for me. But Leicester was a conceivable
rendez-vous
, for I had been that way before, even though from Buxton the obvious route was
via
Birmingham. So for my family’s benefit, I invented some objectionable students, likely to travel by Birmingham, whom I wanted to avoid. Roland, in similar mood, wrote that if he could not get leave he would come without it.

When the morning arrived, my mother decided that I seemed what she called ‘nervy’, and insisted upon accompanying me to Miller’s Dale, the junction at which travellers from Buxton change to the main line. I began in despair to wonder whether she would elect to come with me all the way to Oxford, but I finally escaped without her suspecting that I had any intention other than that of catching the first available train from Leicester. The usual telegram was demanded, but I protested that at Oxford station there was always such a rush for a cab that I couldn’t possibly find time to telegraph until after tea.

At Leicester, Roland, who had started from Peterborough soon after dawn, was waiting for me with another sheaf of pale pink roses. He looked tired, and said he had had a cold; actually, it was incipient influenza and he ought to have been in bed, but I did not discover this till afterwards.

To be alone with one another after so much observation was quite overwhelming, and for a time conversation in the Grand Hotel lounge moved somewhat spasmodically. But constraint disappeared when he told me with obvious pride that he had asked his own colonel for permission to interview the colonel of the 5th Norfolks, who were stationed some distance away and were shortly going to the front, with a view to getting a transfer.

‘Next time I see the C.O.,’ he announced, ‘I shall tell him the colonel of the 5th was away. I shall say I spent the whole day looking for him - so after lunch I’m coming with you to Oxford.’

I tried to subdue my leaping joy by a protest about his cold, but as we both knew this to be insincere it was quite ineffective. I only stipulated that when we arrived he must lose me at the station; ‘chap. rules’, even more Victorian than the social code of Buxton, made it inexpedient for a woman student to be seen in Oxford with a young man who was not her brother.

So we found an empty first-class carriage and travelled together from Leicester to Oxford. It was a queer journey; the memory of its profound unsatisfactoriness remains with me still. I had not realised before that to be alone together would bring, all too quickly, the knowledge that being alone together was not enough. It was an intolerable realisation, for I knew too that death might so easily overtake us before there could be anything more. I was dependent, he had only his pay, and we were both so distressingly young.

Thus a new constraint arose between us which again made it difficult to talk. We tried to discuss impersonally the places that we wanted to see when it was possible to travel once more; we’d go to Florence together, he said, directly the War was over.

‘But,’ I objected - my age-perspective being somewhat different from that of to-day - ‘it wouldn’t be proper until I’m at least thirty.’

‘Don’t worry,’ he replied persuasively. ‘I’m sure I can arrange for it to be “proper” before you get to that age!’

And then, somehow, we found ourselves suddenly admitting that each had kept the other’s letters right from the beginning. We were now only a few miles from Oxford, and it was the first real thing that we had said. As we sat together silently watching the crimson sun set over the flooded land, some quality in his nearness became so unbearable that, all unsophisticated as I was, I felt afraid. I tried to explain it to myself afterwards by a familiar quotation: ‘There is no beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’

When the grey towers slid into view, unsuitably accompanied by the gas-works and the cemetery, I put out my hand to say good-bye. With sudden vehemence he pressed it against his lips, and kept it there until the train stopped. I could not speak any more, but at the station I looked back at him walking forlornly down the platform; as a final irony I had allowed him to send off the telegram saying that I had arrived safely. Later he told me that he had followed me in a hansom to Somerville and had walked up and down outside the circumspect red walls until it was time for his train to leave. He did not say how he had retraced the tedious journey to Peterborough, but he admitted that the prolonged travelling had cost him three days in bed. ‘“Do I still think it was all worth while?” Can you ask?’

9