Ivor John Carnegie Brown

“ She told him as they drove back together in their taxi.
"After all," she began, "compare my work with yours. Mine is drudgery. Yours is big and important. It doesn't matter what becomes of mine, but it matters a lot what becomes of yours, I hate mine and I love yours. I want to give myself up to yours, to make it easier and better. Can't you see, Martin dear, that isn't selfishness or unselfishness. Those words don't count in such a case. If we love, then I'm you and you're me, and one person can't give to himself or take away from himself surely." ”

“ He could endure that for the glory of sharing in a rag, a colossal rag with Neave and Cullen as leaders. Besides he hated Randall's, hated them so bitterly that the prospect of soaking their beds and smashing their pitchers was heavenly even at the cost of swipings innumerable. Nowhere is group feeling more obvious and more powerful than in the world of youth. In a single term Martin had become so passionately one of Berney's that his hatred of Randall's and their smudgy type of success made him quiver with anger. ”

“ Up on that lonely course with only the wind and the white clouds for neighbours, with no one to keep them back or hurry them on, with turf so springy that a foot could never tire, so spongy-soft that a brassie might be lightly taken and effectively wielded, with the exquisite strain of even conflict, with matches taken to the last green and won, perhaps by Martin's inimitable 'run-up'—yes, it was golf. ”

“ They had escaped from Oxford and the gas-works, from gramophones and the university boathouse. It was a special haunt of their own to which they had come, one of Hinksey's unpathed waters, very narrow and remote. At length they made fast to a stump of wood and smoked in peace.
It was all over. They had lived through a week of sweltering agony, of darting to the Schools in cap and gown and stuffy clothes, of darting out again to see how many words they had got wrong in their translation. Such is the dignity of Greats. ”

“ Martin had arranged to meet Lawrence and Rendell at Seatoller in the Lakes. He went in a bitter mood, hungry for Freda, physically stale, and hopeless. But the traditional rain never came and soon they knew every crag of Honister and Grey Knotts, of Glaramara, of The Gables and the Scawfells, of the Langdale Pikes. The challenge of wind and weather on the hills and the flaming splendour of Borrowdale in autumn drove apprehension and despair from his soul. He learned that in some places a man cannot be morbid. ”

“ For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream. Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. ”

“ It wasn't only that the holidays began to-morrow: the night's achievement had been perfect. There is something essentially satisfying to human nature in the lavish destruction of property: with joy we watch the havoc wrought by the cinema comedian or the pantomime knockabout, and with joy the patron of fairs smashes the bottles in a rifle-range. Martin revelled in the thought that forty pitchers lay shattered and shimmering on the zinc roof below him. And now, more than ever, he felt the pleasures of comradeship. Randall's had been humiliated: Berney's had triumphed. ”

“ Mr Berney sat at the head of the table. He was a little, freckled man with a fair moustache: he had become a schoolmaster through despair and a housemaster through patience. His chief interest lay in natural history and botany, and he was never so happy as when he forgot all about the school and his house and tramped the surrounding country. He managed his house with a bare minimum of efficiency and was never loved and never hated. In the routine of teaching at school and administration at home he worked steadily, without mistakes and without enthusiasm. ”

“ Martin began to live for those afternoons; yet, if he had been off his game, had sliced with his driver and topped with his irons, as was indeed his wont, the golf-club would have lost its appeal: there is little pleasure in playing golf badly, but there is all the world in playing above your form.
Once Freda came up to watch them and walk as far as she could. But she was plainly bored, pleaded fatigue, and went back to the little club-house where she sat reading. To Martin, in his present mood of triumphant exultation, it seemed incredible that anyone could fail to see the point of it. ”

“ And I want to see women working as they love to work, not sordidly and cheaply in a market of labour. The women I want will not work against men, but with them and for them, fashioning beautiful homes and beautiful things of every kind. And you will find that it is no use to put woman on a level with men because women are not crudely rational like men, who analyse and destroy. With woman lies the future, because she alone can create without destroying. Man is destructive and analytic. Woman is ultimate, intuitive, basic, and synthetic. ”

“ When the long day's wait was over he would have Freda to himself. Then London became beautiful in every line and form and colour. The lamps were flaming jewels and the rain-soaked, glittering streets were bands of silver: the murkiest lane threw off its squalor, and the night, with its great glooms and shadows, its sudden bursts of iridescence and its mystery of swiftly moving figures, made him think of Eastern jungles, splashed with fierce colours, cavernous with infinite shade. ”

“ That night Martin reflected on the events of the day. What surprised him most was the depth and intensity of his feelings about Freda. It wasn't love, it wasn't mere sympathy: was it just sentimentality? It is a habit of the younger generation in these days to turn their sexual emotions into channels of political reasoning: the result is called feminism. Instead of defending hapless women with strong right arm they are eager to defend underpaid women by strike or Act of Parliament. There is little difference, for the reason that Nature cannot be cheated. ”

“ Freda is clever and quick. Perhaps she really cares for Martin, perhaps she's only sick to death of the hellish existence decreed by modern civilisation for penniless orphans of the female sex. But she has lived in a groove, she has never met people—not the kind of people she'd run up against in India. She doesn't like games or society. She likes talking and arguing and lying in bed. She'd hate the Anglo-Indian just as she hates any kind of pomp and circumstance. ”

“ In one matter she had been fortunate. She had found a cheap room at the top of an old house in Bloomsbury and was thus spared the necessity of going to one of those gloomy mansions for working women. It was a small room, high up and chilly: but it was hers, and even the gas-fire could not rob it of real comfort.
Martin had not meant to linger in London as he had work to do. But he soon realised the impossibility of going away. Not only did he need Freda, but she too needed him. There was no advantage in denying the mutual emptiness and mutual satisfaction. ”

“ The people who cry out for Censors of Art seem to imagine that Art makes public opinion. It may do so now and then, but it's much more important to realise that public opinion makes current art. Art is the emergence of what people are feeling and thinking, and our schools, like our art, must be an expression of the national self."
"But the national self," said Martin, "is pretty stiff."
"That is true, but it doesn't matter. My idea is that, being Englishmen, we ought to make the best of it. Smash international capitalism, which is hellish, and stick to any good things England can give. ”

“ John Berrisford was always willing to talk after his third glass of port and he welcomed Martin's questions.
"Of course you know," he said, "that though I'm a revolutionary in politics and economics, I'm a sound Tory about institutions and the things that matter, like beef and beer. So I believe in the Public Schools and the Universities, not because they're good, but because they are. Everything that is, must be an expression of human nature, and, being rather an optimist, I think it has some good in it. Anyhow, we can't take human nature and twist it about, as social reformers want to do. ”

“ Moreover, he had somehow been obsessed with a notion that all Cambridge colleges, with the exception of King's and Trinity, were like public schools continued. Had not Heseltine gone to Cambridge? But Oxford would be very different; for how could Oxford, the home of Shelley and Swinburne and Morris, be anything but beautiful and brilliant? Martin was thrilled by the exquisite promise of life: Oxford would be heavenly, and heaven—well, heaven would be all atheism and epigrams. ”

“ Every school, even so modern a foundation as Elfrey, has its traditional rows, its stories of rags perpetrated on a colossal scale by the heroes of old: but the modern schoolboy finds that, like fights, they don't happen. Martin's life moved calmly on and its monotony was only broken by sundry interludes, painful or humorous, with masters or prefects. Still, ragging old Barmy was tame enough and only once was he involved in a genuine row, an affair that counted and was history for several years. ”

“ The conversation had at any cost to be changed, and Martin was pleased when the general attention was directed to the colossal hoggishness of Flannery, who was mixing jam, sardines, and potted meat.
As time went on the agony of suspense grew like an avalanche, carrying all before it. Martin did practically no work during prep. Impossible to linger over algebra or the Bacchæ when Spots and his cups obsessed the mind. It was not the injustice of being victimised for a slip of the memory when Pearson was in sicker, but the possibility of being shown up as a coward that tortured him most. ”

“ Everyone, except the six new boys, had plenty to say, and in the prolonged absence of Moore they passed freely about from cubicle to cubicle. It was already a quarter past ten.
Martin, of course, lay quietly in bed gazing at the cracks in the plaster above him and wondering how long it would be before the lights went out and sleep became possible. His thoughts shifted painfully from chapel to collars, from collars to the Lower Fifth. This invasion of a new world which had seemed only a week ago to be so supreme an adventure was nothing but a nuisance and an agony. ”

“ Drift, a play in four acts by Villiers Wentworth, turned out to be a fair specimen of that now antiquated genre, The New Drama. It had the monosyllabic title, the insistent realism, the contempt for form and dramatic convention, the arid conversation with lapses of brilliance, the admirable acting, and, above all, the Great Gloom. It was naturally a play with a point, showing, justly and forcibly, the hopeless inadequacy of modern life to provide the average man and woman with anything like a Unity of Interest. ”

“ After all, the best college—with all due respect to you, Cartmell, and to you, Martin—has a front quad like a toy castle and a chapel—well, I suppose it's the kind of chapel that particular college ought to have, according to all tradition—a Great Speckled Warning against God. Half the most sensible people in Oxford don't know a jot about the architecture, but they know Oxford. ”

“ Why wouldn't Freda see the point of these things? Why wouldn't she walk? She was strong enough now for a mile or two. Almost he was angry with her for having been ill, for it is an odd feature of humanity that we sometimes dislike people for their sufferings, hate them for a cough or sniff. And now Martin was on the point of blaming Freda for the weakness he had once adored. Why wasn't she strong like Margaret or Viola? Why didn't she understand about the moor and wind-swept spaces and the miracle of hitting a golf-ball? ”

“ The winter crept on dismally, and Martin studied Bengali or rode on horseback over Shotover and Port meadow. But there was something wrong about Oxford: he felt old and alien and the college, when he entered it, seemed to be bubbling over with freshmen, all amazingly young and innocent and happy. He was vaguely jealous of them, uncharitably hostile. Were they not talking as he had talked, idling as he had idled? One friend he had, a poet in his third year, discreet and practical. From time to time Martin dined with him and forgot about India.
Most of all Freda mattered. ”

“ Martin wanted to meet women openly, if he had to meet them, and to face things clearly and honestly. But he couldn't do so because of morality, official morality with its peeping proctors and furtive pettiness. How Lawrence and he had thrashed it all out! It seemed that men should have honourable and reasonable relations with women, and yet, because of decency, it came to this. Wherever man met woman, there also must be mean slinking and shame-faced meeting, taxis and back lanes and a sordid round of evasion. Earlier in the term the sheer joy of release had blinded him to the squalor of it. ”

“ At Elfrey, Daniel had suffered an eclipse, as always happened when Martin had anything very much to think about: at Berney's he had either been tired enough to fall asleep immediately or else he had had something on his mind, to-morrow's repetition, an order of Leopard's, or a game of football. And, besides, Martin had reflected that such methods of amusement as the 'Daniel game' were childish and quite incompatible with the dignity of a Public School boy. But at The Steading the temptation to restore Daniel to life became very urgent and Martin at length swallowed his scruples. ”

“ It's true that a middle-class home may be deadly; so far I agree with the paper. But I don't agree that the minor's next step is to smash the home altogether. No, we've got to save it if we want to save men from being turned into mere wealth-producing machines. We've got to save it with all its dangers because it is the expression of genuine and valuable emotion. You people are all for smashing the home before you've smashed the system: my idea is just the reverse. When you have a state in which men can take pride and find beauty in their work, you can go in and smash the home. ”

“ He liked discussing teams and the chances of teams, but he had never had personal successes in athletics; while he knew that the correct hitting of a ball might be one of life's most splendid things, his experience of that pleasure was too fragmentary to satisfy his appetite. His talks with Gregson had been enjoyable, for they had given him an opportunity to let himself go: but life, on the whole, this life at school which was universally supposed to teem with opportunities, had become monotonous and barren. One could live without feeling.
But Anstey made a difference. ”

“ And there were the three other players awaiting with tense anxiety the future of the match. Godfrey was kneeling to take the line of his putt: the ball would end its journey along the side of a veritable mountain, a glorious stroke to achieve! Farther back were Margaret and Viola. Suddenly the breeze caught them, snatched at a stray wisp of hair, played with their skirts, and gave a last caress to cheeks already kissed to flame. There were grace and strength knit perfectly: to Martin they seemed, after the slight form of Freda, tremendous. Yet why shouldn't women be strong? ”

“ Undoubtedly, however, Barmy could be hurt, and Martin was not old enough to understand the consummate brutality of the proceedings in that dismal room. Like all young schoolboys, Martin regarded a master or crusher as a natural foe, a person with whom truceless war is waged. If he is fool enough to let himself be ragged, that is his look-out: he has all the resources of punishment on his side and if he cannot use them he deserves no mercy. So Martin worked off his vitality in ragging, and, being of an ingenious turn of mind, became noted for the improvisation of new japes. ”

“ He was old enough now to be troubled by sex, not as something abstract that might crop up in a theoretical future, but as a present pain and pleasure: in his growing restlessness he tended inevitably to find his ideal personified in every woman who was not quite a fool, the wish being always father to the thought. Viola Cartmell's masculine attributes, her managing ways, and her power of thought and argument gave him a genuine excuse for setting her on his pedestal. ”

“ If you try and put the home on a business basis you may help a few middle-class people who have brains and time enough to quarrel, but you'll be taking from the oppressed their only release and making life more commercial and sordid than it is at present. Set up a society where life has rational interests, where a man can express his desire for beauty without leaving it to nocturnal sentimentality, and I'm with you. In the meanwhile there's a good deal to be said for The Little Grey Home in the West. It answers a need. To kill that need you must smash Industrialism. ”