A Difficult Young Man (12 page)

Uncle Bertie did not want Aunt Maysie to bring Helena, as she would see Dominic, but Aunt Maysie said:

‘She must say goodbye to Steven, and what on earth could Dominic do with fifty people standing round?'

‘As long as it was immoral or violent,' said Uncle Bertie, ‘Dominic could do anything anywhere.' But he let Helena go on the condition that she did not leave her mother's side.

So we embarked amongst a crowd of chattering relatives, who were hiding their genuine regret at our departure under chaff, or easing it by promises to meet again soon, not only because they had strong family affections, but because this migration emphasized what the sack of Beaumanoir meant to them. Helena stood by her mother's side, obeying her instructions, and Dominic stood next to her, as if they were a bride and bridegroom, at a wedding reception, though they were much more like something I saw many years
later and to which I have already referred, the magpie standing by its wounded mate on the Harkaway road.

At last the siren blew for the visitors to leave the ship. There was a fair amount of kissing, except between those two for whom it would have been an ineffable joy.

Diana said: ‘We'll come over to visit you next year,' and Baba, who was talking loudly as she thought it very smart to be seeing relatives off to England, said she would come too. Steven smiled bleakly, wondering if half the world was not enough distance to free him from excessive family ties, though he was sorry to break them. It was one of the burdens of his life that he was unable to help his relatives as much as he would have wished, either financially or by showing them where their advantage lay. Being unable to do this, he tried to avoid the spectacle of their foolishness, though he did not succeed, as it was most evident in his own children, who were either killed or peculiar.

Our relatives trailed down the gangway and lined up along the edge of the pier. As the black and spewing wall of the ship moved slowly away, Dominic kept his eyes fixed on that one of the tiny group of coloured dolls whom he knew to be Helena, till they broke up and drifted slowly down the pier, to take the train back to Melbourne, where there was no onion woman to hold them on her skirts, no Beaumanoir to keep them united, and now no Westhill even, where they might
preserve their identity with deep draughts of the family atmosphere.

I too did not yet realize that I would no longer have the things I had known all my life to that date. I had lived nowhere but at Westhill, and was tied to it by innumerable habits and pleasures. When I went out riding there were places where I had a tacit agreement with my pony that we should jump the ditch. When we went for picnics our cavalcade used to stop at Mrs Schmidt's cottage to collect a large slab of ‘apple scone' her special delicacy, to take with us. In the still autumn days we used to drive the twenty miles down to Frankston to bathe. There were also the activities connected with the house with which we helped, fruit-picking, the annual bottling of the wine, and even the jam-making when the year's supply bubbled scented and scalding in the huge copper pans. There were also our incessant charades in which we acted with our cousins, travesties of historical scenes or skits on our relatives, on Uncle Wolfie and the Dells. All these things made the pattern and colour of life as I had known it, yet when Laura asked me if I would like to leave Westhill for England, I threw the full weight of my juvenile opinion in favour of the move, not knowing that I was condemning myself to that geographical schizophrenia which has made it impossible for me to regard any country as wholly my own.

That night in my cabin, which I shared with Dominic, as Brian was not sailing till some months
later, I had a dim realization of what had happened, but Dominic was far more depressed than I. It is possible that my own misgiving made me open to his mood, for when we were both lying awake in the darkness, again I felt that intolerable pity which he sometimes awoke in me, when that streak in my nature which resembled his own, my touch of the blood that darkened his imagination beat more strongly in my veins, and gave me a knowledge of what he suffered when the absence of love was for him the presence of death.

CHAPTER VIII

AT THE
time our parents decided to return to England, Waterpark was let, sketchily furnished, to a Colonel Rodgers. He had recently lost his wife, whose income had helped to run the place, but it now went to their only child, a daughter married to a major in a Gurkha regiment and living in India. This left Colonel Rodgers with inadequate money to continue at Waterpark, and also with insufficient outlet for his emotions, which had some effect on ourselves. He was relieved when Steven wrote asking him to end the tenancy, and he asked if he might have instead the secondary residence called the Dower House, though no dowager had lived in it for a hundred years. Uncle Arthur had been going to live there when he returned from his tragic honeymoon with Damaris Tunstall, and since then there had been
a feeling that there was a blight on the place. At the moment it was empty, and Steven was only too pleased to let Colonel Rodgers have it.

It was in the Easter holidays that Steven and I saw Dominic standing by Tamburlaine's grave. We were installed at Waterpark by the end of August, our lives having been revolutionized in a few months. This was my first conscious experience of antiquity, as my grand tour of the Continent had been completed before I was six months old. I arrived at Waterpark at the beginning of my adolescence, and at that impressionable time its dignified but intimate beauty, the deep chestnut lane leading up to the house, the half-concealed gate in the garden wall, the meadows beyond the stream, and the mellow Queen Anne façade of the house itself; hiding from the formal visitor much older quarters at the back, Saxon cellars and low-beamed attics, awakened in me a condition similar to that of being in love. I was walking into the scenes of my childhood's imagination, formed by the conversations of my parents and by English poetry, particularly that of Tennyson and Keats. Here were the high walled garden and the autumnal brook. The sensations which came over me on my first day at Waterpark, have been repeated at various times in my life, at Beaulieu, in the ruins of Tintern, and in certain Cambridge courts, and I felt they were the result of a kind of emanation from the stones.

Now that we have arrived in England I must obtrude myself into the story more than I have done hitherto, and ask the reader to put Dominic out of his mind, or rather at the back of his mind for a while, and give his attention to myself, while I describe a phase of my life which will horrify all right-minded people, by which I mean those who believe that boys should be imitation men. To justify this I must repeat that I am one of the characters in this book, and that the things which have affected my emotional and intellectual growth, such as it is, have consequently coloured my story, and the glasses through which I see my parents, Dominic, Colonel Rodgers and the rest of us.

If a prefect at a minor public school called Brockhurst to which I was sent for the Michaelmas term, had not made advances to me, which—do not be alarmed—I resisted, I might have assimilated conventions and adopted an attitude which would have regarded all art, writing, painting and music as despicable pastimes, unfitted for the men of our island race. Hell knows no fury like a prefect scorned, and this youth, whose name I shall suppress as he is now in a government office, made it appear that with a malicious intention I had broken an important rule of the school. He arranged that this should come to the notice of the headmaster, and I was brought up on to the platform of the Big Hall, and as Brian had been a few years earlier on the other side of the world,
exhibited to the assembled school, but for my moral, not my sartorial defects.

It seems disproportionate, and due to more than mere chance that this should have happened both to Brian and to me. One would rather have expected it to happen to Dominic, but why to us, the more disarming and orderly members of the family? Was our virtue only comparative, and did the masters see intuitively that we too did not belong to the herd? Did we go about emitting—it was hardly a thing we could commit—the military crime of ‘dumb insolence,' a Teba arrogance plus a Langton levity? Neither were the Bynghams conformists, and of a Byngham ancestor it is written: ‘Contrary to the traditions of his house, his lordship supported the existing government.'

One of the objects of this book is to discover if Dominic was really mad, as they said at the end. By the very conventional we were all thought to be a little odd. Steven was an individualist, but he was far from insane. His mental processes were logical in the extreme. And yet is not extreme logic an absurdity against nature? We do not find exactness anywhere in the natural world. Every tree of the same species is of a different shape. Only those which bear no true flowers can properly be clipped into a hedge, the poisonous yew and the gloomy cyprus. However, this happened. Two of the sons of a respectable country gentleman of superior intelligence, in two different schools by two different headmasters, were mounted on a platform and pointed
out with the most venomous ridicule, as beneath the normal decent level of young male humanity.

After this performance, through which, knowing myself innocent, I stood in a state of bewilderment but, as a boy told me later, emitting thick waves of dumb insolence which must have been partly responsible for the mounting fury of the headmaster's abuse, I was told by Mr Trend, my housemaster to come to his study. It was evening and he told me to go first to my dormitory and change into pyjamas which I did. In his study he told me to take off my pyjama trousers which I refused to do, as I was very modest, and did not think that he should see my bare behind, let alone hit it. He rushed at me and tugged at the strings of my pyjama trousers until they fell to the floor, and I imagined that I was to be the victim of an even more obscene assault than I had suffered from the prefect, which I was, though on this occasion it was only indirectly sensual. He told me to bend over and gave me what he called ‘eight of the best,' which preserved his self-respect, in the same way that we preserve our self-respect when we have thrown a bomb down a dugout and murdered eight defenceless men, by calling it ‘mopping up,' or when we have drowned in one night countless thousands, by calling it ‘dam-busting,' and now our military leaders, forseeing the final crawling bestial struggles of humanity when their great cities are destroyed, have invented the term ‘broken-back warfare,' and to this they refer in public
speeches as the next ‘party.' These imbecilities may easily result from their having been trained to conceal reality in the hearty jargon of public schools.

During the next day I began to have some of the feelings which so often possessed Dominic, that the human race was hostile to me. I was also surprised that England, which I had thought the hub of civilization, should reveal itself as less civilized than Australia, and I thought with regret of my school at Kew, where beating was only done by the headmaster, and then with reluctance as a last resort, and never to gratify his own lusts.

In the evening I came out of the trance in which I had been living. Somehow the authorities had discovered what had really happened, though they did not know that the prefect had fixed the blame on me. Again Mr Trend sent for me, and I thought perhaps I was to be subjected to a second assault. But when I came into the study, to my surprise, he greeted me with a smile, though by no means a pleasant one. He was in early middle age, but had at first glance, like many schoolmasters and dons and also some clergymen, a boyish face. Then one saw that he was like a boy who has been kept in cold storage for about forty years, a kind of pickled boy, and that if he were kissed there would be no tender contact, no delicate bloom against the lips of the person so unfortunate as to make this experiment, but only bristle and scrub.

‘Come in, Langton,' he said, his eyes screwed up in an affectation of geniality, and he waved his hand
towards a table on which was spread a supper of schoolboy luxury, lobsters, iced cakes, peaches and jellies.

I was wildly affronted. I said to myself, ‘He can't get round me like that.' I suppose that I expected the atonement to fit the crime. Having been humiliated and unjustly accused before the whole school, I expected an apology before the same audience, not merely an appeal to my stomach. This may not have been in my conscious mind, but I expect it was at the root of the anger that seized me at the sight of that luscious table. I was much too upset to think clearly.

I muttered ‘No thank you, sir,' and slipped hurriedly out of the room without asking his permission, but he did not call me back. He probably did not know what to do. He could not force lobsters down the throat of a boy who refused them. I went to my dormitory which was empty at that hour. I was trembling with a confusion of anger and shame, at first so violently that I had to hold on to the iron end of my bed to steady myself. I was naturally very polite and full of peace towards men of goodwill. I thought it a dreadful thing rudely to refuse hospitality or a generous gift, and I think the fact that I had done so upset me as much as the brutal assault I had suffered, or the insult that had followed it. I saw nothing ahead of me at the school. What could happen now? A further beating? Or was I to apologize and eat the lobsters? My brain was in a turmoil. I felt as if not only my body but my mind was imprisoned,
and suddenly it appeared to me that the only thing to do was to run away. As soon as this idea came into my head I gathered together a few personal belongings. I did not reason about it, but merely obeyed the overpowering impulse to get away from this place, where the thought of remaining produced a kind of jam in my brain.

At the moment it was not difficult to leave unnoticed, as the other boys were at prep, and thought I was guzzling with Mr Trend, who himself had gone to the headmaster to discuss what should be done with me now. By devious ways in the darkness I escaped from the school precincts, and ran the mile to the railway station, where I was lucky to catch a train in a few minutes. The porter who sold me a ticket looked suspiciously at my school cap and said, ‘Where are you off to?' I foolishly said that I had measles and had been sent home, and he was too slow-witted to realize that boys with measles are not sent to travel home alone at night, before my train had steamed out of the station, bearing myself in an empty third-class carriage, though I had only been able to afford a ticket for half the journey.

I was still shaky, but at first elated and defiant. Then as the slow train jogged across country to Trowbridge, where I had to change, I began to feel cold and unwell, and it hurt me to sit on the hard jolting seat, so I lay along it, sitting upright only at the stations, in order not to attract attention to myself. Except for a country woman who entered my carriage, and so forced me to sit
up between three stations, I travelled all the way alone. I tried to sing to cheer myself up, but the only thing that came into my head was a hymn they used sometimes to sing in the evening in Berwick church, which began: ‘Alone with none but thee my God, I journey on my way.' This produced in me an overwhelming sense of desolation and I burst into tears, and I think that the causes of this were much the same as those of Dominic's fit of sobbing when he returned from the agricultural college. He had been hoping to start a new life, with good friendships. I too had thought everything in England would be wonderful, and I was proud that I was to be an English public-schoolboy, and I too had looked forward to friendships. And I felt that we, the Langtons, were different from all other people, because these things happened to us. I had recovered a little by the time I alighted at Trowbridge, and in the train to Frome for the first time, so odd are the gaps in the youthful mind, I began to wonder what Steven and Laura would say. Seeing that they had received Dominic with only a patient shrug on his successive returns from the various establishments to which they had sent him, I imagined that my reception would be much the same.

At Frome I explained my situation to the station master, though I did not mention that I was a runaway. I said that if he would let me use his telephone, someone would come to meet me and bring the money to pay what was owing on my fare.

Steven answered the telephone as Laura had gone to bed, and the butler was dismissed for the night. He sounded irritable and puzzled, and as the telephone service was poor, thought he was not hearing correctly.

‘What? Where are you?' he asked. ‘Frome! Why are you at Frome? What?'

‘I had to come home,' I said, further depressed at his tone of voice. ‘Will you send the car for me and some money to pay my fare?'

‘How can I send anyone at this hour? They're all in bed. Are you ill?'

‘Not exactly,' I replied, feeling justified by my sore behind.

‘All right. Wait there.' As he hung up the receiver I heard a faint ‘Damn!'

While I waited the station master talked to me about Austin, whom he remembered with respect because of the number of horses he drove. When I heard Steven's car pull up outside the station, I went to him and asked for the money for my fare.

‘Why didn't you get it from your master before you left?' he asked. When I had said “Not exactly' he thought the school had been dispersed because of some epidemic.

‘I couldn't,' I said.

‘Why not?'

‘I ran away.'

Steven was stunned into silence by this, and then
he said quietly: ‘Good God!' He gave me a gold half-sovereign and I went in and paid the station master. When I returned he held open the door for me, but did not speak. On the road to Waterpark I asked plaintively:

‘Don't you want to hear about it?'

‘I don't want to hear about it
twice
,'
he replied. ‘Your mother will have to be told and I'll hear about it then.'

We drove in silence for the rest of the way, except for a few comments Steven made on the running of the car. When we came into the drawing-room at Waterpark, blinking in the light, Laura was there, having dressed herself in a thing called a tea-gown, and a white Shetland shawl. When she saw me she gave an exclamation of surprise, not at my presence but at my appearance, which, I did not know until then, showed what I had been through. My eyes were dark and enlarged and my face
drawn and white, smudged with my tears and the
dirt of the train.