Noble in Reason (6 page)

“You're welcome,” I replied in Yorkshire style. But ashamed of my acquiescence in her polite fiction I added honestly: “Really it's the other way round; I thank you for yours.”

Beatrice laughed, and the golden motes danced in her eyes.

“Never contradict a lady, Christopher,” she said with mock solemnity.

I went up the Ashroyd path with a skip and a jump; with the quick reactions of childhood I had for the moment forgotten my school adversaries, my self-respect was quite restored.

Next morning in break while we were throwing a cricketball around—I as usual missing it and exciting cries of derision and contempt—suddenly everyone fell silent and looking round I saw my brother John watching us, very still and grim.

“Did you want me, John?” I said in some alarm, going up to him.

“No,” said John shortly, without looking at me. He put me to one side. “What I want to know is, what were you all doing yesterday, chasing my brother through the trees?”

“It was only a game,” said I faintly, scarlet with shame.

“Aye, it was only a game—we were only playing,” said one or two voices apologetically.

“They were teasing him a bit, like,” added Atkinson, more honest than the rest.

“Well, just stop it, or I'll tease you,” said John.

“We weren't doing anything wrong,” said Graham at this in an insolent tone. “It's just that he's such a cry-baby and a tell-tale.”

“He didn't tell me. You were seen,” said John. A silence fell.

Although John had not the prestige of belonging to the sixth form—Henry had outstripped him in that respect—he looked amazingly large, heavy, muscular and determined compared with my classmates, who suddenly appeared small and frail. I did not blame them at all—on the contrary, my sympathies were entirely with them—when looks of fear appeared on their previously perky faces, and they resumed their antics with the ball in a subdued way, behaving with considerable courtesy to me. John stood and watched; I tried hard not to disgrace him further by “muffing” catches. Graham, however, went out of his way to show up my lack of prowess by throwing catches impossible to reach. As I fixed my eyes anxiously on him, trying to anticipate the direction in which he meant to throw the ball, I saw on his face a look of unconcealed hate. If I could render in terms sufficiently expressive the pain, the grief this caused me, a pain which spread all over my body so that even my wrists and ankles seemed to melt into anguish, I should be a much finer writer than I fear I can ever hope to be.
I fall back on old phrases and say: my blood turned to water, my heart failed within me, I turned my face to the wall, hope died.

Unfortunately another, equally bitter, experience awaited me that night at home.

It was then the custom—neither radio nor television programmes being then in existence and even the cinema still struggling in embryo—for the young lads and girls of our section of society, i.e. the middle middle-class, to ride about in the light warm evenings on bicycles, which were then just reaching a high state of development, popularity and cheapness. Groups of cyclists rode back and forth across the open space of grass known as Hudley Moor, exchanging rude cheerful greetings, or dismounted and stood talking in knots round drinking-troughs and lamp-posts; a certain amount of flirtation between boys and girls still at school laid the foundation for future preferences. Parents were probably unaware of this last item in the evening's programme, and thought their offspring safely and hygienically occupied, exercising in the fresh air with contemporaries of the same sex.

My father after a good deal of pressure had presented John with a bicycle when he reached the appropriate age; Henry's machine followed rapidly after—my father always favoured Henry. A bicycle for me lay in the future as yet and there was a wounding doubt in the family as to my ability to ride one. I was indeed uncertain on a bicycle as yet; still I had learned to stand on the “step” in the rear and ride behind Henry or John on the not very frequent occasions when they would condescend to take me.

That night, longing for some reassurance, some cheering occupation, I went out into our back porch and watched my brothers wistfully as they gave their machines a polish. I yearned for an invitation but had not the courage to ask for one. John glancing up from his work with a wash-leather and seeing
me standing there, no doubt looking decidedly woebegone after the wretched experience of the day, frowned and said:

“Take Chris with you on your step, Henry.”

“Take him on yours!” flashed Henry.

My brothers glared into each other's eyes for a long moment.

Then John flung the leather across into its box with one of his careless clumsy movements, applied his trouser-clips to his ankles, mounted his bicycle and without a word rode away. Henry with compressed lips continued to polish his handlebars. By this time I had set my heart on going with Henry; I clung desperately to the project because the alternative was an evening of brooding over Graham's hatred. I screwed myself to the sticking-point—on these occasions my heart beat fast, my throat contracted.

“I wish you would take me, Henry,” I managed to utter at last in a thin constrained tone.

“I can't take you to-night, Christopher,” replied Henry gravely.

He rode off.

Choking with disappointment, I felt I could not bear to meet my parents just yet—Netta was in bed. Accordingly I went into the drawing-room, opened the piano and began to play a little piece by Grieg in which Henry was instructing me. The strong vibrant chords of this
Väterlandisches Lied,
with their emotional appeal, expanded my bruised heart—perhaps one day I should be a great musician and everyone, even Graham, would admire me! I was playing the piece for the third time with immense “expression” when my father put his head round the door.

“Do stop that awful
row,
Christopher,” he said irritably. “Your mother has a headache.”

Evidently I was not to become a great musician. ... If ever a child felt despised and rejected, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, I felt so then.

Looking back on these wretched schooldays—they did not last very long; Graham was sent away to boarding-school after the summer holidays that year, and I myself left the school shortly afterwards—but looking back on them now, I perceive of course, that, again, their troubles were not peculiar to Christopher Jarmayne; they were common to all boys (and girls too, I shouldn't wonder) of my type. The weakling is a continual temptation to the streak of cruelty which lies in all of us, and the artist is always disliked, for he is not committed to the battle as are his fellows; he stands aside and watches. (Nobody likes to be watched by a critical intelligence, for nobody likes to be judged.) But it was certainly a great relief and stimulus when in my later teens I discovered from my reading that sufferings of this kind occur frequently in the biographies of men who have later made their mark. Indeed a very macabre story which I read quite recently—
The Playground
by Ray Bradbury—seems to postulate these youthful agonies for ail children. (One wonders about animals in the same stage. I have sometimes believed I could discern a wounding ostracism of one lamb by its fellows in their evening gambols, but perhaps I am mistaken here.)

There is something—not much, but something—to be said on the side of the tormentors. The weak are always by their weakness demanding response and protection, a response which the strong feel a moral compulsion to offer. Now nothing is more maddening than a moral compulsion to give an emotional response; at once one wishes to withhold it. Weakness in a way is—I will not say a form of moral blackmail (like a woman's carefully timed tears) but—a continual presentation of a bill for pity. Small boys, whose moral sense is undeveloped and fund of pity small, are not prepared to pay this bill. Indeed cordial and generous payment is a lesson hard enough to learn in later life.

I perceive now, of course, that the yellow dandelions were shudderingly odious to me because the cut of their fiery golden petals reminded me of my father's rippling hair and beard. I perceive too that there was some truth in my classmates' assertions that they were playing a game with me in the grove.

They genuinely disliked me less there than anywhere, because they had a feeling of daring in venturing into that forbidden territory, and respected me for my defiance of authority, of the
Trespassers
board, in entering it.

Was there a certain masochism, a desire for punishment, in my seeking-out of Graham? When I read to-day of victims of the vile interrogations in dictator countries becoming attached to their cruel interrogators, I sometimes wonder whether something of this feeling did not colour my preference for my tormentor. Or was I simply going through the normal phases of social development—the human being needing, I am told, first his mother, then a group of friends, then a single friend of the same sex, then a beloved of the opposite sex—and reaching the third stage earlier than my contemporaries? Perhaps both; but this wretched experience of rejection made me ever afterwards intensely chary of offering my friendship; I could not believe that anybody could want it—or me.

It was years, however—I was in my thirties—before I fathomed the motive which lay behind Graham's hatred of me. The enlightenment came eventually from Atkinson, upon whom I had to pay a business call. We met anonymously at first—he was the works manager of a Kirkroyd Bridge dyeing plant—but as soon as I saw his round face, his round-arched eyebrows, his round eyes and short stubby body, I exclaimed his name.

“Aye! And you're Jarmayne tertius. You've grown pretty well, considering the wreckling you were then,” said Atkinson cheerfully.

“I was always grateful to you for rescuing my spectacles,” said I.

“Little devils we were then,” said Atkinson, shaking his head. We laughed together—on my part, rather falsely. “It was that Graham, you know,” continued Atkinson. “He had his knife into you, as they say.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you see, you knocked him out proper.”

“What do you mean?” I exclaimed angrily; for my unheroic failure on that fisticuff occasion particularly vexed me. “I hit him once, but it was the merest glancing blow. The knocking out was, I assure you, all on his side.”

“Nay,” said Atkinson, shaking his head again. “He was jealous of you.”

“Jealous! Impossible! What had I that he could envy?” I asked incredulously, thinking of Graham's good looks, his power of leadership, his prowess in games.

“Brains. Graham were always top of the form before you came. Then you always beat him. Then he got tired of trying, and behaved stupid-like on purpose. That's why he left—you remember? His father wasn't satisfied with his progress. A very ambitious chap always, my father used to say, was parson Graham.”

I was dumbfounded. Such an idea had, I can truly say, never entered my head. But now I remembered the significant word
rivals
which Graham had used to me. My sympathy rushed out to Graham. He was dead by that time, too, which made it worse.

“I wish he would have been friends with me,” I said uneasily.

“Aye. You might have been as thick as thieves together,” agreed Atkinson. “I told him so. But you never seemed to notice what you were doing to him, you see. He was vexed to be outdone by a little squit like you. Now about this piece,” said Atkinson in a more serious tone, turning to the cloth in
question, which lay on the long table beside us: “Your people say the dye's uneven. But we say the fault's in the weave. . . .”

So I too was to blame for the wretchedness of our schooltime together, and perhaps the results were worse for Graham than for me. My troubles then started in me, or confirmed in me perhaps, a hatred of persecution which has never left me all my life. Even to-day, forty years after Graham first snatched my cap, I cannot endure to see a child surrounded by a jeering circle of its contemporaries. A sharp pain twangs through my whole body at the sight; I have stopped the car, rushed across the road, interrogated children hotly, in a word made a public ass of myself, to effect a rescue. Political persecutions affect me in the same way; I cannot easily sit quiet while a concerted attack is made on any person, in the press, at a meeting or even in committee.

On the other hand, this experience at school turned me for ever away from pacifism. I discovered then, though of course without formulating it to myself, that peaceful intentions are no protection, no barrier against evil. Nobody in the world was more peaceful than I at school, more full of goodwill and eager friendliness. But it was not enough; it did not save me from suffering harm, or the others from the harm of inflicting harm on me. The law of life is self-defence; to abrogate that right leads logically to self-destruction. I love peace with all my heart, and seek to ensue it, but never since my schooldays with Graham have I believed that pacifism was the road to peace.

I see now too how, in relating everything that happens to one's own feelings, one falsifies and loses one's way. I have never forgotten the pain of rejection which I felt that night when John and Henry went out on their bicycles and left me. Yet in reality their actions had nothing whatever to do with me. They were related to a deep experience which my
brothers were then beginning to share: namely a jealous rivalry over Beatrice Darrell. Henry already loved Beatrice— he had always loved her—with all the force of his strong, narrow, fastidious, upright nature; he gave her an adoring and utterly faithful homage and treated her, I am sure, with every possible delicacy and respect. John, a despiser of girls in his rough early teens, had just reached the stage when they suddenly blossomed into his chief preoccupation. A healthy, lusty, aggressive male, as soon as he became aware of Beatrice's charms he set out to enjoy them. The tedium of Beatrice's aimless life, and the natural daring of her disposition, no doubt assisted his advances; at any rate John and Beatrice met in the grove for kisses, as the events of that and the previous day sufficiently indicated if I had had eyes to see it. Both my brothers hoped to meet Beatrice that night; neither wished to be hampered in their courtship by a naïve and observant small brother.