The Balliols (58 page)

Nichols stammered awkwardly.

“Sir, I didn't, sir—that's not what I meant, sir.”

“It's what you've said. ‘Being so unattractive in appearance, I should doubt it.' Those are your exact words. ‘I' is the subject of the sentence, and that clause is adjectival to it. Isn't that so, Jones-Evans?”

“Certainly, sir, certainly.”

“Then, please, Nichols, please, explain to the form and to myself what exactly you meant to say.”

There was a moment's pause. Then, in a desperate rally of insolent courage, Nichols faced his master.

“I meant, sir, because you were so unattractive in appearance.”

There was a gasp of surprise from the rows of benches.

Hugh's urbane smile remained unaltered. “Then why on earth, if that is what you meant, did you not say so? In fact,” he continued, turning to Jones-Evans, “I'm very much afraid that our young friend has again perpetrated a libel on us. I shudder to think what Mr. Nichols will imagine to be our standard here. ‘They cannot spell,' he will say. ‘They cannot write English.' I'm afraid, Nichols, that the form will again have to protect its interests. So, perhaps you will write out a hundred times and deliver to me before lock-up to-morrow, the sentence as you should have written it. Let me see, how shall we phrase it? Ah, yes! ‘I rather doubt if the form will put up with Mr. Balliol's conceit, because he is so unattractive in appearance.' I think that will do, Jones-Evans? Yes—I had hoped so. And a hundred times, Nichols, before lock-up to-morrow. That will be admirable. And now, perhaps, you will tell us how the letter came to reach me?”

“It got into the wrong envelope.”

“That, Nichols, we have surmised. One does not usually send to one's form master private communications to one's parents. How did you come to be writing to me at all?”

Nichols' power of repartee was spent. He gazed at the floor sullenly, while the small boys tittered.

“That imposition, sir. I hadn't time to bring it. So I sent it through the post.”

Hugh threw up his hands. “That imposition! I was just wondering what had happened to it. So, instead of that interesting, if ill-written, letter, your father has received one hundred and fifty lines. Well, I hope he has found them legible. In the meantime, it is a little unfortunate because, you see, I have made a hobby of collecting lines. I amassed while I was a prefect here, two thousand lines. I had reserved for you the honour of opening my collection as a master. I suppose the only thing to be done, is for me to write to your father, enclosing this letter and asking him to return the lines.”

A look of blank and horrified dismay was spread over Nichols' features. He began to stammer a protest.

“But, sir, really sir—I mean, sir—my f-father, sir, he's cer-certain to have destroyed them.”

Hugh's equanimity remained unruffled.

“Possibly, Nichols, possibly. But we must do the best we can. I shouldn't like you to be put to the trouble of writing these lines again. In fact, the sooner we get the letter off to your father the better. I'll just scribble a little note. His address is, you say, 142, Hammerton Place. Thank you very much. Now, Jones-Evans, if you'll just take this down to the post office? Thank you very much.”

As the door closed behind the Shell's spokesman, Hugh smiled pleasantly on his assailant. “Well, I have done the best I can for you. We may get the lines back, who knows? Now, I think you can return to your seat and we'll begin our lesson.”

In a stupor Nichols walked back to his desk. He had meant it to be so supreme a hoax. First of all, he would have let Hugh know exactly what he thought of him with impunity. Secondly, he would have got off doing his hundred and fifty lines. He would certainly be able, he had thought, after that letter to bluff it through. Thirdly, he would have reinstated himself in the form's good opinion. As it was, he had got three hundred additional lines and that tell-tale letter was on its way to Hammerton Place.

The thought of that letter, like the splashing of cold water on the face of a dazed man, recalled him to his senses. Whatever
happened, whatever the punishment, however ignominious the confession, he must stop that letter from reaching his parents.

He jumped suddenly to his feet.

“Please, sir, that letter … may I stop it? It's all untrue. I didn't send those lines home. I never did them.”

Hugh lowered the book from which he had been reading to the form.

“My dear Nichols, none of us ever thought you had.”

There was another roar of laughter, through which Nichols stammered miserably.

“Then, may I, sir, please, sir, may I?”

Slowly, while his victim endured agonies of impatience, Hugh drew out his watch from his waistcoat pocket.

“It would take me less than five minutes to walk from here to the post office. Jones-Evans will not, I imagine, hurry himself. It will probably take him seven. It is six minutes since he left the room. You have, therefore, one minute in which to catch him. Run!”

The last word came abruptly like an order on parade. In obedience to it Nichols leapt from his seat and precipitated his body through the door.

Six minutes later he returned with Jones-Evans; he was gasping, a hang-dog expression on his face. He was in for it now, he supposed. Six of the best, at least.

But Hugh was too clever to allow him the faint glory of a punishment bravely borne. He looked at him with a smile of indulgent, fatherly contempt.

“We have reached the end of line 47. You will proceed to translate from there. And if, Nichols, you are no better at Latin translation than you are at ragging masters, you will have, I fear, to write the lesson out again.”

There was a roar of laughter, and in that laugh Nichols' reputation as a ragster passed for ever. The Shell was amenable to discipline.

“At last,” thought Hugh, “I can not only treat these people like human beings, I can behave like one.”

The news of Nichols' discomfiture did not take long to become common property throughout the school. For the first time Francis felt really proud of his brother: or rather, for the first time was able to take personal pleasure in one of his achievements.

“It was fine,” he told him. “Everyone's saying what a sport you are.”

His enthusiasm was so considerable that to his brother it seemed excessive. In the reaction from a success, Hugh had begun to feel that the contest, if not unworthy of being waged, should never have begun. There seemed too much fighting everywhere. You could only win people's respect by stamping upon someone else's face. He felt resentful at having had such a fight forced on him.

“I must say that I was rather surprised at the way they started ragging,” he told Francis.

“How did you expect them to begin?”

“I don't know. I thought they'd have waited a little.”

“They'd have missed their best chance then. Hit a bowler off his length before he has a chance of finding it.”

“I should have thought in the circumstances.…” He paused, uncertain of what exactly he did mean.

Francis laughed.

“Now you don't mean that you expected to be let down lightly because you were an Old Boy, and had been a soldier and got wounded, and won a cross or something?”

“Of course not.”

But as a matter of fact that was more or less what he had thought. And the scorn with which Francis had received the suggestion explained even more clearly than the actual ragging had done the difference of attitude between Francis's generation and his own. He did not expect any sympathy or consideration as “a war hero.” To ask for it would have been the last thing he would have done. At the same time he did feel he was entitled to some kind of differential treatment. There were special circumstances in his case: to which he would have been ashamed to draw attention, but which he expected others to recognize; which he felt that he himself as a boy would have recognized, but that Francis did not.

In the whole nature of the Shell's attack on him there was a spirit of unsentimental ruthlessness: the self-sufficiency of a generation that had been ignored, that had been left to its own devices, to find its own entertainment in its own way: that was not so much cruel as blind to everything but self-interest. His brother's generation had not so much been brought up as left to bring itself up. It had a feeling of the world against it; of fun to be got in spite of others: not because of others: it had a capacity for contempt that it was ready to turn upon itself. They had been brought up under the shadow of the war. But it was unlikely that they would take any active part in it. Suddenly the war would end as abruptly as it had begun, and they would be faced with an entirely new set of problems.
Their life had not the continuity of impulse that his generation had had. Once again they would be left to their own devices.

“I wonder what they'll make of it,” he thought. He wondered into what kind of men would grow up the boys who thought consideration for “a war hero” merely the foolish flinging away of a good hand.

History records that the war started on August 4th, 1914 and ended in 1919 on the 19th of July. But the lives of individuals are not arranged on the same framework of dates as the lives of nations. For each individual the war began when he became absorbed in it, and ended when his part in it was finished. For some it had started before August 1914; for many it did not start till considerably later. For many it ended before the Armistice. There are those for whom it has not finished yet. For Hugh Balliol it ended with the burst of a whizzbang on the Somme offensive. As for innumerable others during those weeks, it both began and ended.

For rough purposes of generalization the war may be divided into two halves; up to the Somme and after the Somme. It was a different war after the Somme; it was fought in a different spirit by different men. The basic political and international differences—the fall of Asquith, Russia out of the war, America in the war, the failure of 1916 Peace negotiations, the U-Boat campaign—had their counterpart in the line. Up to the Somme the war had been fought by the old regulars, the territorials, the first Kitchener recruits. Most of that lot were out of the war by the Christmas of 1916. Their places were taken by Derbyites, conscripts, by those who had been too young to enlist in the first autumn. The post-Somme armies went to the front in a different mood. Though the young ones most of them had been fretting till they had passed the age test, they had come not of their own free wills: there was an atmosphere of coercion. The crusade spirit had been exchanged for a spirit of distrust; distrust of the generals who were mismanaging the war; the politicians who put office before country; the industrialists who were making money out of the war; the old men who demanded from their club arm-chairs the exactment of the last pound of flesh; the dignitaries of the press and pulpit who blessed the banners that they let others carry. At home there were the food queues and the ration cards. The spirit of Passchendaele was very different from the spirit of Loos and Neuve Chapelle.

For the Balliols—with the exception of Stella, rising rapidly from one position of importance to another as the importance of women's
contribution to the war was recognized—the last half of the war was a harbourage after the storm-tossed passage of the first two years. Ruth was still at Tavenham; a mother for the second time, with Victor wounded again at Bullecourt, second-in-command of the depot, and unlikely to be sent overseas again. For Francis the war was post-dated to his eighteenth birthday: the 15th September 1919. Till then there was the barrack-room atmosphere of school; athletics, at a time when games were derided as a wartime occupation, but adulated as the pre-war training of the new army; when it was considered a fine thing to have been an athlete before the war, but contemptible to take a game seriously during it: form work when it was uncertain whether a world would return that would value scholarship: parades and squad drill and P.T. when it was doubtful whether their training would be tested on the battlefield; lectures, addresses, sermons on duty, patriotism, responsibility at a time when one's destiny was obscure, when one was travelling one knew not where, when one was being trained for one knew not what.

From Lucy, immune in Malaya from air-raids, U-boat campaigns, food shortage, came modestly proud accounts of her children's progress: of how Jane could read and Marion could talk. She enclosed drawings in coloured chalks that ingenuity could recognize as the representation of palm trees and canoes. She described the industry of her husband who, with his two partners at the war, was responsible for the entire firm. She enclosed a photograph of their new car. “It seems an extravagance in wartime, but one must allow oneself some luxuries even at a time like this.” They were moving into a new house. It was much larger than their old one. They would now need a staff of six boys to run it properly. But really Stephen owed it to his position.

For Helen the war existed as a khaki-clad brother who kissed her good-bye and brought her presents; as a map in the study on which her father moved the flags that represented armies; as an ogre called the Kaiser who displaced in nightmares the giants and sorcerers of fairy lore.

For Jane there were the uncertain hours, the missed meals, the long absences and on her face the look of tranquil, abstract happiness whose nature and reason her husband was resolved to explore.

For Balliol there was the routine of work, whose emoluments increased in pace with the purchasing power of the nation. He invested the additional profits to himself in French War Loan, regarding it as his contribution to the war. His patriotism was recompensed at an interest of five per cent. He enrolled as a special
constable but declined on account of his age to parade in the grey uniform of the
Georgius Rex
on Hampstead Heath. He played his regular game of golf on Saturday afternoons; he complained to the committee about the condition of the greens; but was told that in wartime green-keepers were few and dear. The supply of caddies was also inadequate. But the relative emptiness of the course amply compensated for these deficiencies. And as the committee had been able, using the plea of officers on leave who needed healthy entertainment, to revoke the decision of the landlords of the ecclesiastical commission, that golf should be forbidden upon Sundays, he derived greater enjoyment from his golf than at any other time. His drive was shorter, but it was straighter. If his approach shots were less bold, his chipping and his putting were more accurate. As always at the end of a round a comparison with recent scores convinced him that he was playing at least two strokes better; but his handicap remained fourteen.