John Martin

“ Sweat dripped from Martin's face, on the man's face, and he felt the arm-muscles and the ribs pressed against his body as he clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was as if his body were taking part in the agony of this man's body. At last they were washed out, all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every part, eternally alike. ”

“ 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. ”

“ MARTIN, PETER JOHN (1786–1860) , geologist, was born in 1786 at Pulborough, Sussex, where his father, Peter Patrick Martin, a native of Scotland, was a practitioner of medicine. He was chiefly educated by his father and an elder brother, and studied medicine, first at the United Hospital, as it then was, of Guy's and St. Thomas's, and afterwards at Edinburgh. Father and sons alike had literary tastes, and the former ultimately retired from practice and resided in Paris, where he died at the age of ninety. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So the air is dense with tobacco smoke and the reek of beer and champagne. In one corner they are playing poker with their coats off. All the chairs are full of sprawling young men who stamp their feet to the time, and bang their fists down so that the bottles dance on the tables.
"God help Kaiser Bill."
Sky and sea are opal grey. Martin is [11] stretched on the deck in the bow of the boat with an unopened book beside him. He has never been so happy in his life. The future is nothing to him, the past is nothing to him. ”

“ Some men imagined that Martin would bow to the judgment of the people and give it up. They did not know the stern, uncompromising, footstep-following principles that dwell at the bottom of his heart. He will never give it up—the people must take it: he has got nothing else for them. ”

“ Yet Martin's attitude was one of adoration, not of passion. Quite apart from the manifest impossibility of making love, apart too from the fact that, even if circumstances had allowed, he did not know how to make love, he did not even want to make love. He wanted to be with her, to watch her, above all to talk with her: and that was the limit of his desires.
On the tennis court Margaret and he were too strong for Robert and Viola; accordingly the two Berrisfords fought great battles against the visitors and as a rule prevailed. But they were not invincible. ”

“ His uniform hung in a formless clot of mud about a slender frame. They had treated him at the dressing-station for a gash in his upper arm, and he was being used to help the stretcher-bearers. Martin sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching him listlessly as he walked down the rutted road under the torn shreds of camouflage that fluttered a little in the wind. Martin wondered what he was thinking. Did he accept all this stench and filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things? ”

“ By the time he had returned to The Steading his personality had so grown and developed that he was freed from painful memories and able to enjoy his holidays.
The Berrisfords were people of sound sense, and seeing what manner of boy he was made no effort to entertain him. Robert, the son at Rugby, was seventeen and a prefect, so that Martin was afraid of him and kept aloof: of Margaret, as a girl, he was naturally shy. He preferred to wander alone in the fields and coverts, now marking the ways of bird and beast, now plotting out his future and building up strange fantasies of thought. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet Martin was half-conscious that he lied. His affection for Anstey had forced him to tell a needless falsehood in a futile effort to quiet the voice which cried within him: "He isn't good enough for you." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He made friends with everybody and was criticised by the squires for being a rebel and by the rebels, of whom the village had two, for being a squire. This amused him intensely and his first answer to all criticism was a drink. Then he would start out magnificently to justify his position. "I get the best of everything," he said, and meant it.
Martin, of course, missed his father's companionship: they had lived on very intimate terms and the customary limitations of the parental relationship had been broken through. ”

“ Martin now became thoroughly engrossed in cricket. He neglected to work for one or two school prizes, but he knew that he could get a leaving scholarship without difficulty. Thus he became a more prominent figure in the house and was, on the whole, much happier than in the days of reading and thinking. He abandoned Wells the social theorist for Wells the fantastic romancer and combined Wisden's Almanac with Arnold Bennett for his literature in prep-time. He knew now that he couldn't bowl googlies at all: on the house pitches it depended on the lie of the land which way the ball broke. ”

“ A compromise is fatal and undergraduates must exist in hundreds or not at all. A soft drizzle fell from a yellow, smudgy sky and the streets were covered with a particularly loathsome mud. As he drove down from the station to King's (he was to have rooms in college) , Martin was horrified: he felt that he had never seen a more lamentable place. To be rattled in a hansom down George Street and then brought face to face with the front quad of Balliol is not an inspiring method of approach to beauty. But King's was more presentable. ”

“ Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood out against emptiness, starkly black. ”

“ There were murmurs of: "Bad luck," "Old Spots is the limit," "Just because he got the chuck for not tackling."
And then Neave remarked in the midst of a silence: "If we get nailed funking a collar we get swiped. But if Spots gets nailed, then he swipes someone else. That's justice."
The expressions of genuine sympathy were very comforting to Martin. Though now the numbness was wearing off and the reality of his pain came home to him, he was happier than he had been for days. ”

“ John Hill is not a man to withhold such information as he possesses on any point, and you may gather from him much that is of interest about the people of the place and their talk. An unfamiliar word, or one that he thinks ought to be unfamiliar to you, he will usually spell—as c-o-b cob, and the like. It is not, however, relevant to my purpose to record his conversation before the moment when we reached Martin’s Close. ”

“ There would be rows too outside, in the passage, scuffling and ragging and the singing of all the latest successes. But after the dusty turmoil of the workroom it was a possession and, though Martin was not at that time the kind of person to care intensely about his surroundings or little pieces of property, he took a definite pride in his books and pictures. He was old enough now to be above actresses: other and greater persons might bedeck their walls with fair women, but Gregson and he had decided that such things were only good for the army class. ”

“ Of course one picks things up by experience, but it might be done so much better...."
"And then the narrowness," he rambled on, for he found a good audience in Martin. "You'll get a first in Mods, if you take the trouble, and by the time you're twenty or twenty-one you'll know all about Athenian law-courts and what the Greek is for a demurrer or a counter-claim, and you'll know all the hard words in Homer and be able to translate Cicero's jokes. You'll cram up a lot of variant readings for your special play and collect a nice set of texts with all the difficult passages marked. ”

“ Martin remembered nights of wild battling with insoluble problems and days when he had gazed in despair at papers recently set and realised his complete incapacity to inform the examiners about modality or the legal aspects of the Cæsar-Pompey quarrel.
"You used to get jolly black?" said Lawrence, remembering silences and outbursts or the lonely walks that Martin sometimes took.
"It's all very well for you," retorted Martin. "You may have to look forward to dull sort of work, but you're secure enough. I'm just beginning this business of getting a job and it's poor fun. ”

“ So Martin was not only amused but influenced and on his return to Elfrey for the summer term gave up worrying about the pros and cons of Public School education. He determined to enjoy himself, and he knew that in order to enjoy himself he must have an interest. It couldn't be concerned with art, because in that case he would have to keep it to himself. It must be a common interest, a part of school life. Ultimately, he fixed upon the bowling of googlies. ”

“ It is at no great distance from the road, and is part of what is there called a moor, in other words, a rough upland pasture cut up into largish fields.
‘Why is this little bit hedged off so?’ I asked, and John Hill (whose answer I cannot represent as perfectly as I should like) was not at fault. ‘That’s what we call Martin’s Close, sir: ‘tes a curious thing ‘bout that bit of land, sir: goes by the name of Martin’s Close, sir. M-a-r-t-i-n Martin. Beg pardon, sir, did Rector tell you to make inquiry of me ‘bout that, sir?’ ‘Yes, he did.’ ‘Ah, I thought so much, sir. ”

“ Martin admired him, in spite of his intellectual limitations, and aspired to a similar method of government which should be at once peaceful and efficient. It had occurred that, without becoming 'the boy among boys' or 'the workroom pet' or anything horrible of that sort, it might be possible to avoid irresponsible tyranny. Mainly owing to the influence of his social and political views he had bullied himself into the belief that the workroom would be much better if left alone. What the younger members of the house needed was to be trusted, not beaten. ”

“ But it is the privilege of youth to forget easily, and it was fortunate for Martin that almost directly after his father's death he should have been plunged into a new world, a world whose thronging cares and pleasures gave few moments for reflection. ”

“ He was obviously a boy in whom an interest could be taken, and the Terror warmed to him even to the extent of abandoning the sardonic humour on which he so prided himself. According to all the best traditions of scholastic fiction, Martin should have been unpopular for this reason, but as a matter of fact the bloods were far too bored with the Terror and all his works, and far too contemptuous of all clever kids and 'sweat-guts,' to take the least notice of what happened: or, if they did take notice, they were not going to give themselves away by showing it. ”

“ Before long Martin quarrelled with Reggie Petworth, sulked foolishly, despaired of the term, and began to rely on the winter vacation and the subsequent six weeks of term to grapple with the problem of Mods. He spent a miserable Christmas at The Steading and came to the conclusion on New Year's Eve that he had forgotten nearly every word of Greek and Latin that he had ever known. He did not look forward to the term, and on January the fifteenth he went to Oxford as a lamb to the slaughter. ”