The Complete Stories (40 page)

  Behind the masters, out of sight in the side aisles, was a dowdy huddle of matrons and wives.

  The service began with a procession of the choir: "Hail Festal Day," with Wykham-Blake as the treble cantor. At the rear of the procession came Mr. Peacock, the Chaplain and the Headmaster. A week ago Charles had gone to church in London with Aunt Philippa. He did not as a rule go to church in the holidays, but being in London for the last week Aunt Philippa had said, "There's nothing much we can do today. Let's see what entertainment the Church can offer. I'm told there is a very remarkable freak named Father Wimperis." So, together, they had gone on the top of a bus to a northern suburb where Mr. Wimperis was at the time drawing great congregations. His preaching was not theatrical by Neapolitan standards, Aunt Philippa said afterwards; "However, I enjoyed him hugely. He is irresistibly common." For twenty minutes Mr. Wimperis alternately fluted and boomed from the pulpit, wrestled with the reading-stand and summoned the country to industrial peace. At the end he performed a little ceremony of his own invention, advancing to the church steps in cope and biretta with what proved to be a large silver salt cellar in his hands. "My people," he said simply, scattering salt before him, "you are the salt of the earth."

  "I believe he has something new like that every week," said Aunt Philippa. "It must be lovely to live in his neighbourhood."

  Charles's was not a God-fearing home. Until August 1914 his father had been accustomed to read family prayers every morning; on the outbreak of war he abruptly stopped the practice, explaining, when asked, that there was now nothing left to pray for. When Charles's mother was killed there was a memorial service for her at Boughton, his home village, but Charles's father did not go with him and Aunt Philippa. "It was all her confounded patriotism," he said, not to Charles but to Aunt Philippa, who did not repeat the remark until many years later. "She had no business to go off to Serbia like that. Do you think it my duty to marry again?"

  "No," said Aunt Philippa.

  "Nothing would induce me to—least of all my duty."

  The service followed its course. As often happened, two small boys fainted and were carried out by house-captains; a third left bleeding at the nose. Mr. Peacock sang the Gospel over-loudly. It was his first public appearance. Symonds looked up from his Greek, frowned and continued reading. Presently it was time for Communion; most of the boys who had been confirmed went up to the chancel rails, Charles with them. Symonds sat back, twisted his long legs into the aisle to allow his row to pass, and remained in his place. Charles took Communion and returned to his row. He had been confirmed the term before, incuriously, without expectation or disappointment. When, later in life, he read accounts of the emotional disturbances caused in other boys by the ceremony he found them unintelligible; to Charles it was one of the rites of adolescence, like being made, when a new boy, to stand on the table and sing. The Chaplain had "prepared" him and had confined his conferences to theology. There had been no probing of his sexual life; he had no sexual life to probe. Instead they had talked of prayer and the sacraments.

  Spierpoint was a product of the Oxford Movement, founded with definite religious aims; in eighty years it had grown more and more to resemble the older Public Schools, but there was still a strong ecclesiastical flavour in the place. Some boys were genuinely devout and their peculiarity was respected; in general profanity was rare and ill-looked-on. Most of the Sixth professed themselves agnostic or atheist.

  The school had been chosen for Charles because, at the age of eleven, he had had a "religious phase" and told his father that he wished to become a priest.

  "Good heavens," his father said; "or do you mean a parson?"

  "A priest of the Anglican Church," said Charles precisely.

  "That's better. I thought you meant a Roman Catholic. Well, a parson's is not at all a bad life for a man with a little money of his own. They can't remove you except for flagrant immorality. Your uncle has been trying to get rid of his fellow at Boughton for ten years—a most offensive fellow but perfectly chaste. He won't budge. It's a great thing in life to have a place you can't be removed from—too few of them."

  But the "phase" had passed and lingered now only in Charles's love of Gothic architecture and breviaries.

  After Communion Charles sat back in his chair thinking about the secular, indeed slightly anti-clerical, lyric which, already inscribed, he was about to illuminate, while the masters and, after them, the women from the side aisles, went up to the rails.

  The food on Sundays was always appreciably worse than on other days; breakfast invariably consisted of boiled eggs, over-boiled and lukewarm.

  Wheatley said, "How many ties do you suppose A. A.'s got?"

  "I began counting last term," said Tamplin, "and got to thirty."

  "Including bows?"

  "Yes."

  "Of course, he's jolly rich."

  "Why doesn't he keep a car, then?" asked Jorkins.

  The hour after breakfast was normally devoted to letter-writing, but today a railway strike had been called and there were no posts. Moreover, since it was the start of term, there was no Sunday Lesson. The whole morning was therefore free and Charles had extracted permission to spend it in the Drawing School. He collected his materials and was soon happily at work.

  The poem—Ralph Hodgson's "'Twould ring the bells of Heaven The wildest peal for years, If Parson lost his senses And people came to theirs ..."—was one of Frank's favourites. In the happy days when he had been House Tutor of Head's, Frank had read poetry aloud on Sunday evenings to any in Head's who cared to come, which was mostly the lower half of the House. He read "There swimmeth One Who swam e'er rivers were begun, And under that Almighty Fin the littlest fish may enter in" and "Abou Ben Adhem, may his tribe increase" and "Under the wide and starry sky" and "What have I done for you, England, my England.....?" and many others of the same comfortable kind; but always before the end of the evening someone would say "Please, sir, can we have ‘The Bells of Heaven'?" Now he read only to his own house but the poems, Frank's pleasant voices, his nightingales, were awake still, warm and bright with remembered firelight.

  Charles did not question whether the poem was not perfectly suited to the compressed thirteenth-century script in which he had written it. His method of writing was first to draw the letters faintly, freehand in pencil; then with a ruler and ruling pen to ink in the uprights firmly in Indian ink until the page consisted of lines of short and long black perpendiculars; then with a mapping pen he joined them with hair strokes and completed their lozenge-shaped terminals. It was a method he had evolved for himself by trial and error. The initial letters of each line were left blank and these, during the last week of the holidays, he had filled with vermilion, carefully drawn, "Old English" capitals. The T alone remained to do and for this he had selected a model from Shaw's Alphabets, now open before him on the table. It was a florid fifteenth-century letter which needed considerable ingenuity of adaption, for he had decided to attach to it the decorative tail of the J. He worked happily, entirely absorbed, drawing in pencil, then tensely, with breath held, inking the outline with a mapping pen; then, when it was dry—how often, in his impatience, he had ruined his work by attempting this too soon—rubbing away the pencil lines. Finally he got out his watercolours and his red sable brushes. At heart he knew he was going too fast—a monk would take a week over a single letter—but he worked with intensity and in less than two hours the initial with its pendant, convoluted border was finished. Then, as he put away his brushes, the exhilaration left him. It was no good; it was botched; the ink outline varied in thickness, the curves seemed to feel their way cautiously where they should have been bold; in places the colour overran the line and everywhere in contrast to the opaque lithographic ink it was watery and transparent. It was no good.

  Despondently Charles shut his drawing book and put his things together. Outside the Drawing School, steps led down to the Upper Quad past the doors of Brent's House—Frank's. Here he met Mercer.

  "Hullo, been painting?"

  "Yes, if you can call it that."

  "Let me see."

  "No."

  "Please."

  "It's absolutely beastly. I hate it, I tell you. I'd have torn it up if I wasn't going to keep it as a humiliation to look at in case I ever begin to feel I know anything about art."

  "You're always dissatisfied, Ryder. It's the mark of a true artist, I suppose."

  "If I was an artist I shouldn't do things I'd be dissatisfied with. Here, look at it, if you must."

  Mercer gazed at the open page. "What don't you like about it?"

  "The whole thing's nauseating."

  "I suppose it is a bit ornate."

  "There, my dear Mercer, with your usual unerring discernment you have hit upon the one quality that is at all tolerable."

  "Oh, sorry. Anyway, I think the whole thing absolutely first-class."

  "Do you, Mercer. I'm greatly encouraged."

  "You know you're a frightfully difficult man. I don't know why I like you."

  "I know why I like you. Because you are so extremely easy."

  "Coming to the library?"

  "I suppose so."

  When the library was open a prefect sat there entering in a ledger the books which boys took out. Charles as usual made his way to the case where the Art books were kept but before he had time to settle down, as he liked to do, he was accosted by Curtis-Dunne, the old new boy of last term in Brent's. "Don't you think it scandalous," he said, "that on one of the few days of the week when we have the chance to use the library, we should have to kick our heels waiting until some semi-literate prefect chooses to turn up and take us in? I've taken the matter up with the good Frank."

  "Oh, and what did he say to that?"

  "We're trying to work out a scheme by which library privileges can be extended to those who seriously want them, people like you and me and I suppose the good Mercer."

  "I forget for the moment what form you are in."

  "Modern Upper. Please don't think from that I am a scientist. It's simply that in the Navy we had to drop Classics. My interests are entirely literary and political. And of course hedonistic."

  "Oh."

  "Hedonistic above all. By the way, I've been looking through the political and economic section. It's very quaintly chosen, with glaring lacunae. I've just filled three pages in the Suggestions Book. I thought perhaps you'd care to append your signature."

  "No thanks. It's not usual for people without library privileges to write in the Suggestions Book. Besides, I've no interest in economics."

  "I've also written a suggestion about extending the library privileges. Frank needs something to work on, that he can put before the committee."

  He brought the book to the Art bay; Charles read "That since seniority is no indication of literary taste the system of library privileges be revised to provide facilities for those genuinely desirous of using them to advantage."

  "Neatly put, I think," said Curtis-Dunne.

  "You'll be thought frightfully above yourself, writing this."

  "It is already generally recognized that I am above myself, but I want other signatures."

  Charles hesitated. To gain time he said, "I say, what on earth have you got on your feet? Aren't those house shoes?"

  Curtis-Dunne pointed a toe shod in shabby, soft black leather; a laced shoe without a toecap, in surface like the cover of a well-worn Bible. "Ah, you have observed my labour-saving device. I wear them night and morning. They are a constant perplexity to those in authority. When questioned, as happened two or three times a week during my first term, I say they are a naval pattern which my father, on account of extreme poverty, has asked me to wear out. That embarrasses them. But I am sure you do not share these middle-class prejudices. Dear boy, your name, please, to this subversive manifesto."

  Still Charles hesitated. The suggestion outraged Spierpoint taste in all particulars. Whatever intrigues, blandishments and self-advertisements were employed by the ambitious at Spierpoint were always elaborately disguised. Self-effacement and depreciation were the rule. To put oneself explicitly forward for preferment was literally not done. Moreover, the lead came from a boy who was not only in another house and immeasurably Charles's inferior, but also a notorious eccentric. A term back Charles would have rejected the proposal with horror, but today and all this term he was aware of a new voice in his inner counsels, a detached, critical Hyde who intruded his presence more and more often on the conventional, intolerant, subhuman, wholly respectable Dr. Jekyll; a voice, as it were, from a more civilized age, as from the chimney corner in mid-Victorian times there used to break sometimes the sardonic laughter of grandmama, relic of Regency, a clear, outrageous, entirely self-assured disturber among the high and muddled thoughts of her whiskered descendants.

  "Frank's all for the suggestion, you know," said Curtis-Dunne. "He says the initiative must come from us. He can't go pushing reforms which he'll be told nobody really wants. He wants a concrete proposal to put before the library committee."

  That silenced Jekyll. Charles signed.

  "Now," said Curtis-Dunne, "there should be little difficulty with the lad Mercer. He said he'd sign if you would."

  By lunchtime there were twenty-three signatories, including the prefect-in-charge.

  "We have this day lit a candle," said Curtis-Dunne.

  There was some comment around Charles in Hall about his conduct in the library.

  "I know he's awful," said Charles, "but he happens to amuse me."

  "They all think he's barmy in Brent's."

  "Frank doesn't. And anyway I call that a recommendation. As a matter of fact, he's one of the most intelligent men I ever met. If he'd come at the proper time he'd probably be senior to all of us."