Joan and Peter — Adolescence Part 3
§ 11 Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing more than a thing or two.
He was, in fact, learning a vast number of things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture of half-lights.
The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious respectability had invaded his demeanour.
The Head had had him in to tea and tennis.
The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely.
He reproached Joan on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak, political.
They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon.
They discussed the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely.
“Don’t you think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him through?
” “But if he doesn’t work, sir?
” said Wilmington.
“A school oughtn’t to produce that lassitude,” said Oswald.
“A chap ought to _use_ a school,” said Peter.
That was a new point of view to Oswald and Joan.
Afterwards came Troop, a larger boy than either Peter or Wilmington, a prefect, a youth almost incredibly manly in his manner, and joined on to these discussions.
Said Oswald, “There ought not to be such a thing as superannuation.
A man ought not to be let drift to the point of unteachable incapacity.
And then thrown away.
Some master ought to have shepherded him in for special treatment.
” “They don’t look after us to that extent, sir,” said Troop.
“Don’t they teach you?
Or fail to teach you?
” “It’s the school teaches us,” said Peter, as though it had just occurred to him.
“Still, the masters are there,” said Oswald, smiling.
“The masters are there,” Troop acquiesced.
“But the life of the school is the tradition.
And a big chap like Rawdon hanging about, too big to lick and too stupid for responsibility—— It breaks things up, sir.
” Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school life.
Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched Troop and went from Troop to Peter.
This manliness in the taught surprised him tremendously.
Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop seemed to embody it.
Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows, but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected, was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg.
These boys were living in a premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a sort of constitutional monarch.
There was one questionable consequence at least.
They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired wide horizons.
Were the political habits of a school where all the boys were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a world’s affairs?
Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child.
Troop was a good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal attitude.
He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live decently and behave decently.
” He was lured into a story of how one youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any one”—and restrained.
“Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe.
No, I did not _read_ it, sir.
” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances, for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in authority over him.
When he mentioned the king his voice dropped worshipfully.
Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously prolix.
There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows.
Others swished without judgment.
Troop put conscience into each whack.
Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about him.
He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.
” Indeed he had ambitions to be remembered as a reformer.
He hoped, he said, to leave the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely.
His idea of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday.
He did not think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their self-respect.
He was also inclined to a reorganization of the afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.
” There ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study.
No doubt that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked.
“It’s all very well for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir, but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school.
Don’t you think, sir?
” The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was naught.
Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop.
Until presently it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly.
“What does Peter really think of this stuff?
” thought Oswald.
“What does Nobby really think of this stuff?
” queried Peter.
“I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.
“I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.
“Have you thought at all——” “Not yet, sir.
At least——” “Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.
” “I see,” said Oswald.
Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation.
At Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior staff....
Oswald did his best to lure Troop from his administrative preoccupations into general topics.
But apparently some one whom Troop respected had warned him against general topics.
Oswald lugged and pushed the talk towards religion, Aunt Phyllis helping, but they came up against a stone wall.
“My people are Church of England,” said Troop, intimating thereby that his opinions were banked with the proper authorities.
It was not for him to state them.
And in regard to politics, “All my people are Conservative.
” One evening Oswald showed him a portfolio of drawings from various Indian temples, and suggested something of the complex symbolism of the figures.
Troop thought it was “rather unhealthy.
” But—turning from these monstrosities—he had hopes for India.
“My cousin tells me, sir, that cricket and polo are spreading very rapidly there.
” “Polo,” said Oswald, “is an Indian game.
They have played it for centuries.
It came from Persia originally.
” But Troop was unable to imagine Indians riding horses; he had the common British delusion that the horse and the ship were both invented in our islands and that all foreign peoples are necessarily amateurs at such things.
“I thought they rode elephants,” said Troop with quiet conviction....
Troop was not only a great experience for Oswald, he also exercised the always active mind of Joan very considerably.
Peter, it seemed, hadn’t even mentioned her beforehand.
“Hullo!
” said Troop at the sight of her.
“Got a sister?
” “Foster-sister,” said Peter, minimizing the thing.
“Joan, this is Troop.
” Joan regarded him critically.
“Can he play D. P.?
” “Not one of my games,” said Troop, who was chary of all games not usually played.
“It’s a game like Snap,” said Peter with an air of casual contempt, and earned a bright scowl.
For a day or so Troop and Joan kept aloof, watching one another.
Then she caught him out rather neatly twice at single wicket cricket; he had a weakness for giving catches to point and she had observed it.
“Caught!
” he cried approvingly.
Also she snicked and slipped and at last slogged boldly at his patronizing under-arm bowling.
“Here’s a Twister,” he said, like an uncle speaking to a child.
Joan smacked it into the cedar.
“_Twister!
_” quoth Joan, running.
After that he took formal notice of her, betraying a disposition to address her as “Kid.
” (Ralph Connor was at that time adding his quota to the great British tradition.
It is true he wrote in American about cowboys—but a refined cowboy was the fullest realization of an English gentleman’s pre-war ideals—and Ralph Connor’s cowboys are essentially refined.
Thence came the “Kid,” anyhow.
) But Joan took umbrage at the “Kid.
” And she disliked Troop’s manner and influence with Peter.
And the way Peter stood it.
She did not understand what a very, very great being a prefect is in an English public school, she did not know of Troop’s superbness at rugger, it seemed to her that it was bad manners to behave as though a visit to Pelham Ford were an act of princely condescension.
She was even disposed to diagnose Troop’s largeness, very unjustly, as fat.
So she pulled up Troop venomously with “My name’s not Kit, it’s Joan.
J.
O.
A.
N.
” “Sorry!
” said Troop.
And being of that insensitive class whose passions are only to be roused by a smacking, he began to take still more notice of her.
She was, he perceived, a lively Kid.
He felt a strong desire to reprove and influence her.
He had no suspicion that what he really wanted to do was to interest Joan in himself.
Joan’s tennis was incurably tricky.
Troop’s idea of tennis was to play very hard and very swiftly close over the net, but without cunning.
Peter and Wilmington followed his lead.
But Joan forced victory upon an unwilling partner by doing unexpected things.
Troop declared he did not mind being defeated, but that he was shocked by the spirit of Joan’s play.
It wasn’t “sporting.
” “Those short returns aren’t done, Kid,” he said.
“I do them,” said Joan.
“Ancient.
” Peter and Wilmington were visibly shocked, but Troop showed no resentment at the gross familiarity.
“But if every one did them!
” he reasoned.
“I could take them,” said Joan.
“Any one could take them who knew how.
” The dispute seemed likely to die down into unverifiable assertions.
“Peter can take them,” said Joan.
“He drops them back.
But he isn’t doing it today.
” Peter reflected.
Troop would never understand, but there was something reasonable in Joan’s line.
“I’ll see to Joan,” he said abruptly, and came towards the middle of the net.
The game continued on unorthodox but brilliant lines.
“I don’t call this tennis,” said Troop.
“If you served to her left,” said Peter.
“But she’s a girl!
” protested Troop.
“_Serve!
_” He made the concessions that are proper to a lady, and Joan scored the point after a brief rally with Peter.
“Game,” said Joan.
Troop declared he did not care to play again.
It would put him off tennis.
“Take me as a partner,” said Joan.
“No—I don’t think so, thanks,” said Troop coldly.
Every one became thoughtful and drifted towards the net.
Oswald approached from the pergola, considering the problem.
“I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for years,” he remarked, strolling towards them.
“Well, sir, aren’t you with me?
” asked Troop.
“No. I’m for Joan—and Peter.
” “But that sort of trick play——” “No. The way to play a game is to get all over the game and to be equal to anything in it.
If there is a stroke or anything that spoils the game it ought to be barred by the rules.
Apart from that, a game ought to be worked out to its last possibility.
Things oughtn’t to be barred in the interests of a few conventional swipes.
This cutting down of a game to just a few types of stroke——” Peter looked apprehensive.
“It’s laziness,” said Oswald.
Troop was too puzzled to be offended.
“But you have to work tremendously hard, sir, at the proper game.
” “Not mentally,” said Oswald.
“There’s too much good form in all our games.
It’s just a way of cutting down a game to a formality.
” “But, for instance, sir, would you bowl grounders at cricket?
” “If I thought the batsman had been too lazy to learn what to do with them.
Why not?
” “If you look at it like _that_, sir!
” said Troop and had no more to say.
But he went away marvelling.
Oswald was a V. C.
Yet he looked at games like—like an American, he played to win; it was enough to perplex any one....
“Must confess I don’t see it,” said Troop when Oswald had gone....
When at last Troop and Wilmington departed Oswald went with them to the station—the luggage was sent on in the cart—and walked back over the ploughed ridge and up the lane with Peter.
For a time they kept silence, but Troop was in both their minds.
“He’s a good sort,” said Peter.
“Admirable—in some ways.
” “I thought,” said Peter, “you didn’t like him.
You kept on pulling his leg.
” So Peter had seen.
“Well, he doesn’t exercise his brain very much,” said Oswald.
“Stops short at his neck,” said Peter.
“Exercise, I mean.
” “You and Troop are singularly unlike each other,” said Oswald.
“Oh, that’s exactly it.
I can’t make out why I like him.
If nothing else attracted me, that would.
” “Does he know why he likes you?
” “Hasn’t the ghost of an idea.
It worries him at times.
Makes him want to try and get all over me.
” “Does he—at all?
” “Lots,” said Peter.
“I fag at the blessed Cadet Corps simply because I like him.
At rugger he’s rather a god, you know.
And he’s a clean chap.
” “He’s clean.
” “Oh, he’s clean.
It’s catching,” said Peter, and seemed to reflect.
“And in a sort of way lately old Troop’s taken to swatting.
It’s pathetic.
” Then with a shade of anxiety, “I don’t think for a moment he twigged you were pulling his leg.
” Oswald came to the thing that was really troubling him.
“Allowing for his class,” said Oswald, “that young man is growing up to an outlook upon the world about as broad and high as the outlook of a bricklayer’s labourer.
” Peter reflected impartially, and Oswald noted incidentally what a good profile the boy was developing.
“A Clean, Serious bricklayer’s labourer,” said Peter, weighing his adjectives carefully.
“But he may go into Parliament, or have to handle a big business,” said Oswald.
“Army for Troop,” said Peter, “via a university commission.
” “Even armies have to be handled intelligently nowadays,” said Oswald.
“He’ll go into the cavalry,” said Peter, making one of those tremendous jumps in thought that were characteristic of himself and Joan.
§ 12 A day or so after Troop’s departure Peter waylaid Oswald in the garden.
Peter, now that Troop had gone, was amusing himself with dissection again—an interest that Troop had disposed of as a “bit morbid.
” Oswald thought the work Peter did neat and good; he had to brush up his own rather faded memories of Huxley’s laboratory in order to keep pace with the boy.
“I wish you’d come to the Glory Hole and look at an old rat I dissected yesterday.
I want to get its solar plexus and I’m not sure about it.
I’ve been using acetic acid to bring out the nerves, but there’s such a lot of white stuff about....
” The dissection was a good piece of work, the stomach cleaned out and the viscera neatly displayed.
Very much in evidence were eight small embryo rats which the specimen under examination, had not science overtaken her, would presently have added to the rat population of the world.
“The old girl’s been going it,” said Peter in a casual tone, and turned these things over with the handle of his scalpel.
“Now is all _this_ stuff solar plexus, Nobby?
”...
The next morning Oswald stopped short in the middle of his shaving, which in his case involved the most tortuous deflections and grimacings.
“It’s all right with the boy,” he said to himself.
“I _think_ it’s all right.
“No nonsense about it anyhow.
“But what a tortuous, untraceable business the coming of knowledge is!
Curiosity.
A fad for dissecting.
An instinct for cleanliness.
Pride.
A
bigger boy like Troop....
Suppose Troop had been a different sort of boy?...
“But then I suppose Peter and he wouldn’t have hit it off together.
” Oswald scraped, and presently his mind tried over a phrase.
“Inherent powers of selection,” said Oswald.
“Inherent....
I suppose I picked my way through a pretty queer lot of stuff....
” He stood wiping his safety-razor blade.
“There was more mystery in my time and more emotion.
This is better....
“Facts are clean,” said Oswald, uttering the essential faith with which science has faced vice and priestcraft, magic and muddle and fear and mystery, the whole world over.
“Facts are clean.
” § 13 Joan followed a year after Peter to Cambridge.
She entered at Newton Hall.
Both Oswald and Aunt Phyllis preferred Newnham to Girton because of the greater freedom of the former college.
They agreed that, as Oswald put it, if women were to be let out of purdah they might as well be let right out.
Coming from Highmorton to Newnham was like emerging from some narrow, draughty passage in which one marches muddily with a whispering, giggling hockey team all very much of a sort, into a busy and confused market-place, a rather squabbling and very exciting market-place, in which there is the greatest variety of sorts.
And Joan’s mind, too, was opening out in an even greater measure.
A year or so ago she was a spirited, intelligent animal, a being of dreams and unaccountable impulses; in a year or so’s time she was to become a shaped and ordered mind, making plans, controlling every urgency, holding herself in relation to a definite conception of herself and the world.
We have still to gauge the almost immeasurable receptivity of those three or four crucial years.
We have still to grasp what the due use of those years may mean for mankind.
Oswald had been at great pains to find out what was the best education the Empire provided for these two wards of his.
But his researches had brought him to realize chiefly how poor and spiritless a thing was the very best formal education that the Empire could offer.
It seemed to him, in the bitter urgency of his imperial passion, perhaps even poorer than it was.
There was a smattering of Latin, a thinner smattering of Greek, a little patch of Mediterranean history and literature detached from past and future—all university history seemed to Oswald to be in disconnected fragments—but then he would have considered any history fragmentary that did not begin with the geological record and end with a clear tracing of every traceable consequence of the “period” in current affairs; there were mathematical specializations that did not so much broaden the mind as take it into a gully, modern and mediaeval language specializations, philosophical studies that were really not philosophical studies at all but partial examinations of remote and irrelevant systems, the study of a scrap of Plato or Aristotle here, or an excursion (by means of translations) into the Hegelian phraseology there.
This sort of thing given out to a few thousand young men, for the most part greatly preoccupied with games, and to a few hundred young women, was all that Oswald could discover by way of mental binding for the entire empire.
It seemed to him like innervating a body as big as the world with a brain as big as a pin’s head.
As Joan and Peter grew out of school and went up to Cambridge they became more and more aware of a note of lamentation and woe in the voice of their guardian.
He talked at them, over their heads at lunch and dinner, to this or that visitor.
He also talked to them.
But he had a great dread of preachments.
They were aware of his general discontent with the education he was giving them, but as yet they had no standards by which to judge his charges.
Over their heads his voice argued that the universities would give them no access worth considering to the thoughts and facts of India, Russia, or China, that they were ignoring something stupendous called America, that their political and economic science still neglected the fact that every problem in politics, every problem in the organization of production and social co-operation is a psychological problem; and that all these interests were supremely urgent interests, and how the devil was one going to get these things in?
But one thing Joan and Peter did grasp from these spluttering dissertations that flew round and about them.
They had to find out all the most important things in life for themselves.
Perhaps the problem of making the teacher of youth an inspiring figure is an insoluble one.
At any rate, there was no great stir evoked in Joan and Peter by the personalities of any of their university tutors, lecturers, and professors.
These seemed to be for the most part little-spirited, gossiping men.
They had also an effect of being underpaid; they had been caught early by the machinery of prize and scholarship, bred, “in the menagerie”; they were men who knew nothing of the world outside, nothing of effort and adventure, nothing of sin and repentance.
Not that there were not whispers and scandals about, but such sins as the dons knew of were rather in the nature of dirty affectations, got out of Petronius and Suetonius and practised with a tremendous sense of devilment behind locked doors, than those graver and larger sins that really distress and mar mankind.
As Joan and Peter encountered these master minds, they appeared as gowned and capped individuals, hurrying to lecture-rooms, delivering lectures that were often hasty and indistinct, making obscure but caustic allusions to rival teachers, parrying the troublesome inquiring student with an accustomed and often quite pretty wit.
With a lesser subtlety and a greater earnestness the women dons had fallen in with this tradition.
There were occasional shy personal contacts.
But at his tea or breakfast the don was usually too anxious to impress Peter with the idea that he himself was really only a sort of overgrown undergraduate, to produce any other effect at all.
Into the Cambridge lecture rooms and laboratories went Joan and Peter, notebook in hand, and back to digestion in their studies, and presently they went into examination rooms where they vindicated their claim to have attended to textbook and lecture.
In addition Peter did some remarkably good sketches of tutors and professors and fellow students.
This was their “grind,” Joan and Peter considered, a drill they had to go through; it became them to pass these tests creditably—if only to play the game towards old Nobby.
Only with Peter’s specialization in biology did he begin to find any actuality in these processes.
He found a charm in phylogenetic speculations; and above the narrow cañons of formal “research” there were fascinating uplands of wisdom.
Upon those uplands there lay a light in which even political and moral riddles took on a less insoluble aspect.
But going out upon those uplands was straying from the proper work....
Joan got even less from her moral philosophy.
Her principal teacher was a man shaped like a bubble, whose life and thought was all the blowing of a bubble.
He claimed to have _proved_ human immortality.
It was, he said, a very long and severe logical process.
