Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (13 page)

Although my interest threatened effervescence, I managed to be out of the house when Roland arrived. Coming in purposely late for dinner, I greeted with a lofty assumption of indifference the unknown young man who rose hastily from his chair as I opened the door. But I had not been with him for ten minutes before I realised that in maturity and sophistication he was infinitely the superior of both Edward and myself.

At nineteen, Roland looked twenty-four and behaved with the assurance of thirty. Physically he belonged to a type which is impressive rather than handsome; though he was not so tall as slim six-foot Edward, his powerful frame and big head with its stiff, thick hair gave him the appearance of a very large person. In strange contrast with his fair head and pale face, his large dark eyes looked contemplatively at the world from beneath black, strongly marked eyebrows.

I hardly saw him that evening, for after dinner I had to hurry off to Higher Buxton to attend some amateur theatricals which I had been asked to criticise for the
Buxton Advertiser
, whose limited staff of reporters all happened to be otherwise engaged. Not being as well acquainted as I am now with the expedients of newspapers in search of free ‘copy’, I felt very proud of this job. It can hardly have impressed Roland, whose mother had for many years been paid a retaining salary by the Northcliffe Press and who was himself intended for a post on some dignified newspaper such as
The Times
, but the next day, when I was anxiously composing the criticism, I found him beside me unobtrusively suggesting words and phrases.

My diary reminds me that, for the rest of the day, ‘Roland and I discussed various matters such as literature and religion’; that I washed my hair that evening and carried on our conversation in the process of drying it, and that the next morning, on a long walk to a neighbouring village (where the rationalist curate preached and Edward had organ lessons) we ‘had a most interesting conversation, a good deal of which was about our ideas of immortality’.

Modern parents, of course, need hardly to be reminded that if they do not want a serious-natured boy and girl to be mutually attracted, immortality is one of the topics on to which they must not permit them to drift. Another is the intimate analysis of the one’s character by the other - an occupation with which I amused myself and tormented Roland during the course of a ten-mile Sunday walk between hills and moors through the famous Goyt Valley and back to Buxton down the steep Manchester Road. He became very silent under my animadversions on his ‘conceit’ and that manner of expressing it which I called ‘the Quiet Voice’ - a superior tone in speaking which is known to present-day Americans as ‘the Oxford accent’.

Only one fragment of our conversation drifts back to me through the medium of a letter written to Edward during the War:

‘But what
is
God, then?’

‘Well, of course, if we’re going to discuss the nature of the Deity . . .’

But that he had not resented anything I said nor the way in which I said it, I discovered long afterwards from a poem - one of the very few that he did not consign to the waste-paper basket - which he had called ‘
Nachklang
’, and dated April 19th, 1914:

Down the long white road we walked together,
Down between the grey hills and the heather,
Where the tawny-crested
Plover cries.

You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet,
Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it,
And there shone all April
In your eyes.

With your golden voice of tears and laughter
Softened into song: ‘Does aught come after
Life,’ you asked, ‘When life is
Laboured through?

What is God, and all for which we’re striving?’
‘Sweetest sceptic, we were born for living.
Life is Love, and Love is—
You, dear, you.’

When at last we came in for Sunday night supper, which our elders had left for us, Roland and I were seized with remorse at our mutual neglect of Edward - who was, however, mentally composing a piano-and-violin sonata, and did not appear to object - and the three of us sat late over the supper-table, discussing psychical research, and dreams, and premonitions. Roland told us that he had recently gone with his mother to have his hand read by Cheiro, the celebrated palmist, who had warned him that in a year or two he would run considerable risk of ‘assassination’.

‘As if anyone would want to assassinate me!’ he laughed gaily, and we agreed that, despite his quite remarkable likeness to ex-King Manoel of Portugal, the possibility seemed remote.

Before Roland returned home I had to leave Buxton for a long-arranged visit to some relatives in the Lake District. I had been looking forward immensely to this holiday, and could not understand why, when the time came, I suddenly felt so unwilling to go. While I was away a small parcel came for me, addressed in Roland’s handwriting; it contained Olive Schreiner’s
The Story of an African Farm
, which we had discussed in one of our serial conversations about immortality. During the next few weeks I spent a good many troubled, speculative, exciting hours with the little volume clasped in my hands.

‘It is for love’s sake yet more than for any other,’ I read with sudden amazed understanding, ‘that we look for that new time . . . Then when that time comes . . . when love is no more bought or sold, when it is not a means of making bread, when each woman’s life is filled with earnest, independent labour, then love will come to her, a strange sudden sweetness breaking in upon her earnest work; not sought for, but found.’

I cannot remember whether it was before or after the sending of this gift that Roland told me how he had himself been a feminist ever since he discovered that his mother’s work as well as his father’s had paid for his education and their household expenses. A few days later, at any rate, another letter came; its purport was to persuade me to go to Uppingham Speech Day in the summer, and to enclose two more of his poems for which I had asked, ‘Triolet’, and ‘Lines on a Picture by Herbert Schmaltz’.

Latin and mathematics seemed duller and more elusive than ever when I returned to them after my few days in the Lakes. That Easter meeting with Roland had stirred a spring ferment in my blood, which made Latin proses far less congenial than prolonged contemplation of the garden through the window.

‘The birds and the flowers and the sunshine seemed to call me so, I could not keep my mind on what I was doing,’ I wrote in my diary on May 18th. ‘I could only gaze outside and long for someone strong and loving, a man in preference to a woman as most women annoy me, who would be intimate and understanding, so that I should not be any more alone. I long for this,’ I continued sententiously, ‘though I know all the time that strong souls retain and increase their strength best by solitude. Surely though periods of solitude and not solitude always are all that is necessary. I so desire a sympathetic companionship, I do so want as Lyndall did in Olive Schreiner’s book, “something to worship”.’

Tentatively I broached the subject of Uppingham, and found my mother perfectly willing to take me with her to Edward’s last Speech Day; no doubt she welcomed anything that would deflect my attention - to say nothing of my conversation - from the imminent Oxford Senior. The fact that this ordeal would follow immediately after the Speech Day lost, for the moment, its importance, and I settled down to work and to wait with as much patience as juvenile adulthood could muster.

Somehow, the time passed more quickly than I had expected. Absorbed in Unseen Translations and the Binomial Theorem, eagerly looking forward to seeing Roland once more at Uppingham, and mitigating the interval by a heartless retrospective flirtation with my would-be suitor of the previous summer, I entirely failed to notice in the daily papers of June 29th an account of the assassination, on the previous morning, of a European potentate whose name was unknown to me, in a Balkan town of which I had never heard.

8

I have not seen Uppingham since 1914, and probably should not recognise to-day the five-mile road winding up to the village from Manton, nor the grey school buildings and the tiny cramped rooms of the Waterworks Cottage where we stayed. But for ever in my mind’s eye remains a scene which in fact no longer exists, since its background vanished when Edward’s House was pulled down to make room for the Uppingham War Memorial.

It is late evening on a hot July day. My mother has gone to talk to the housemaster, and Edward and I are standing in a dark quadrangle outside the lighted windows of the prefects’ studies. ‘There are boys about in various stages of undress, so we can’t go inside with you here,’ Edward informs me.

I am waiting, as I admit afterwards in my diary, ‘to get a glimpse of the person on whose account, even more than on Edward’s, I must confess I have come’ - and whose Uppingham nickname, I have already gathered, is ‘the Lord’ or, alternatively, ‘Monseigneur’. But naturally, when his shy, eager face appears at the open window, I give no indication of my anxiety to see him; I just laugh, and mock, and tease him for having broken the Uppingham record for prizes.

‘I shall look out for every atom of conceit when you get them to-morrow,’ I tell him, ‘and as soon as I see the least symptom, I mean to squash it flat.’

He caps my criticism without hesitation.

‘Well,’ he replies, ‘you won’t be so very original, after all. One of the housemaster’s wives was asked the other day what she thought of the boy who was taking so many prizes, and she said she knew nothing about him except that he was the biggest mass of conceit in the whole of Uppingham. I wanted to tell her,’ he adds, ‘that I perfectly agreed with her, only I didn’t ask her to say it out loud in front of so many people.’

When, however, I saw Roland - who like Edward was in the Officers’ Training Corps - wearing his colour-sergeant’s uniform at the corps review on the Middle Field next morning, I did not feel inclined to tease him any more. On his mother’s side he had military ancestors, and took the O.T.C. very seriously. He and Edward and their mutual friend Victor, the third member of the devoted trio whom Roland’s mother had christened ‘the Three Musketeers’, were going into camp together near Aldershot for a fortnight after the end of the term.

Some of the masters, perhaps, were more prescient, but I do not believe that any of the gaily clad visitors who watched the corps carrying out its manœuvres and afterwards marching so impressively into the Chapel for the Speech Day service, in the least realised how close at hand was the fate for which it had prepared itself, or how many of those deep and strangely thrilling boys’ voices were to be silent in death before another Speech Day. Looking back upon those three radiant days of July 1914, it seems to me that an ominous stillness, an atmosphere of brooding expectation, must surely have hung about the sunlit flower gardens and the shining green fields. But actually I noticed nothing more serious than the deliberate solemnity of the headmaster’s speech at the prize-giving after the service.

At that time the Headmaster of Uppingham was habitually referred to by the boys as ‘the Man’. A stern and intimidating figure, he had a wide reputation for tact with parents both male and female, and whenever he met my mother - who went to Uppingham much oftener than my father - he never failed to recognise her or to make some discreet comment on Edward’s progress. In this respect he was wiser and more modern-minded than some of his scholastic and clerical contemporaries, who tended to regard women as ‘irrelevant’, and even to-day occasionally combine to write letters to the Press on family life without the collaboration of those who are responsible for the family’s continuation. At least one famous pre-war headmaster, who afterwards became a bishop, was widely regarded as a woman-hater - a reputation hardly guaranteed to inculcate respect for their mothers and their future wives in the impressionable adolescents who came under his influence.

Since the noblest and profoundest emotions that men experience - the emotions of love, of marriage, of fatherhood - come to them, and can come to them, only through women, it seems curious and not a little disturbing that so many schoolmasters appear to regard contempt for the female sex as a necessary part of their educational equipment. I often wonder how many male homosexuals, actual and potential, owe their hatred and fear of women to the warped minds of the men who taught them at school.