The Loom of Youth Part 24

"Awfully sorry, Christy, old fellow ... been kept ... new lot of books from Methuen's ... had to take one up to my wife ... rather ill, you know.... Fire away, Burgess."

All his remarks were flung off in jerks at a terrific rate. The abashed orator concluded rather prematurely and rather wildly; such an incursion was most irregular and very perplexing.

"I will now call on Mr Ferrers to speak."

Up leapt Ferrers and began at once firing off his speech at the pace of a cinematograph. He was full of mannerisms. He would clap his hand over his eyes when he wanted to think of something, and would then spread it out straight before him. It was rather dangerous to get close. He would pick up one of his books and shake it in the face of Christy.

"This is what Mackenzie says ... in _Sinister Street_ ... fine book ...

smashes up everything, shows the shallowness of our education ... this is what he says...."

After he had read a few words, he would bang the book down on the table and continue pouring forth inextricable anacolutha. Everyone was listening; they had never heard anything like this before. It was a revelation. Christy chewed his finger-nails. Burgess a.s.sumed an air of Olympian content. The flood of rhetoric rolled on:

"It is like this, you see; the cla.s.sical education makes you imitate all the time ... Greek Prose like Sophocles ... Latin Verse like Petronius.... I don't know if I have got the names right ... probably not ... never could stick doing it. There is no free thought. Cla.s.sics men do very well in the Foreign Offices, but they can't think.... What do cla.s.sics do in the literary world? Nothing. Bennett, Lloyd George, Wells--the best men never went to a Public School.... We want originality; and the cla.s.sics don't give it. They are all right for a year or so to give a grounding of taste ... though they don't give that to the average boy ... but no more. What did I learn from cla.s.sics?--only to devise a new way of bringing a crib into form.... Is that an education? No, we want French, jolly few cribs to be got of Daudet that are any use to the Lower Fifth ... Maths, that's the stuff ... makes them think.... Riders ... get them out your own way--not Vergil's way or Socrates' way--your own way--originality...."

In this strain he talked for a quarter of an hour, and held the audience spellbound. He had really interested them. Here was something new, something worth listening to. He was received with a roar of clapping.

After his speech everything else fell flat. Christy made one or two super-subtle remarks which no one understood. There was nothing left for Pothering to say; the motion was then put before the House and the debate developed into a farce. Idiot after idiot got up and made some infantile qualification of an earlier statement--all of them talked off the point. So much so, in fact, that Turner was beginning a tale of a fight he had had with a coster down Cheap Street when Christy called him to order.

Gordon at once rose in protest.

"Gentlemen, I address the Chair. It is preposterous that Mr Turner should have been refused a hearing. We may have lost what would perhaps have thrown new light on the subject. Doubtless he had carefully selected this particular anecdote out of a life, alas, too full of excitement" (a roar greeted this, Christy had beaten Turner that very morning for eating chocolates in German), "with the express view of pointing out the superiority of the cla.s.sics. Doubtless the rough in question, not knowing the custom in Homeric contests, had failed to propitiate the G.o.ds, while he, the narrator, had rushed into Back Lane behind Mother Beehive's charming old-world residence, and having offered a prayer to Mars, waited for his burly antagonist in the darkness, and as the vile man, clearly one of St Paul's 'G.o.d haters'" (that time the Sixth were reading the "Romans") "thundered by, he smote him with a stone above the eye, and left him discomfited and, like OEdipus, well nigh blind. Here we see----"

But the meeting never found out what they really saw. Gordon was called to order, and sat down amid a tumult of applause. One or two more speakers brought fresh evidence to bear on the subject; and then there was the division. The moderns won by a huge majority. As the rabble pa.s.sed into the pa.s.sage Gordon heard Ferrers say to Christy in his most patronising manner:

"Rather wiped the ground with you, didn't we?... Well, never mind, you stood no earthly.... Days of the cla.s.sics are over. Still, you fought well.... Third line of defence--_ad triarios_.... I remember a bit of my cla.s.sics."

Gordon was borne out on the stream past the matron's room to the end of the pa.s.sage, and the rest of Ferrers's speech was lost.

From this day the Stoics underwent a complete change. The whole nature of the society was altered. Ferrers was so absolutely different from anything that a master had appeared to be from time immemorial. He was essentially of the new generation, an iconoclast, a follower of Brooke and Gilbert Cannan, heedless of tradition, probing the root of everything. At the end of the term Christy resigned his presidency. He could not keep pace with the whirlwind Ferrers.

"You know, Caruthers," said Tester in second hall, "whatever our personal feelings may be, we have got to allow that this man Ferrers has got something in him."

"Something! Why, I thought him simply glorious. Here he is bursting in on the prude conventionality of Fernhurst full of new ideas, smas.h.i.+ng up the things that have been accepted unquestionably for years. By Jove, the rest of the staff must hate him."

"There was a thing by him in the _A.M.A._ the other day that caused considerable annoyance, I believe. I didn't read the thing myself, but I heard 'the Bull' saying it was disgraceful that a Fernhurst master should be allowed to say such things. I suppose he said something against games."

"Well, d.a.m.n it all, if he did, he is in the wrong. Games are absolutely necessary. What on earth would the country be like without them?"

"A d.a.m.ned sight better, I should think."

"Oh, don't be an a.s.s. Just look at the fellows who don't play games, Rudd and Co. What wrecks they are! Utterly useless. We could do perfectly well without them. Could not we now?"

At this point Betteridge strolled in very leisurely. Authority had made him a dignified person. The days of ragging Trundle seemed very distant.

He did not go about with Mansell so much now. He was more often with Carter and Harding.

"Betteridge, come in and sit down," said Tester; "we were arguing on the value of games. Don't you agree with me that it's about time a man like Ferrers made a sensible attack on them?"

"Yes; though I doubt if Ferrers is quite the man to do it. He is such a revolutionary. He would want to smash everything at once. A gradual change is what is needed. I look at it like this. Games are all right in themselves. A man must keep himself physically fit; but games are only a means to an end. The object of all progress is to get a clear, clean-sighted race, intellectual and broadminded. And I think physical fitness is a great help in the production of a clear, clean mind. The very clever man who is weak bodily is so apt to become a decadent; and because he himself can't stand any real exertion, despises those who can. Games are necessary as a means to an end. But Buller and all the rest of the lot think games are the actual end. Look at the way a man with his footer cap is idealised and wors.h.i.+pped. He may be an utter rake; probably is, most likely he has no brains at all. If he ever had them, he soon ceased to use them, and devotes all his energies to athletic success. Why should we wors.h.i.+p him? Merely because he can kick a rotten football down a rotten field. It is this wors.h.i.+p of athletics that is so wrong."

"Oh, you are talking rot," burst out Gordon angrily; "the English race is the finest in the whole world and has been bred on footer and cricket. I own the Public School system has its faults; but not because of games. It stamps out personality, tries to make types of us all, refuses to allow us to think for ourselves. We have to read and pretend to like what our masters tell us to. No freedom. But games are all right. We all have our own interests. Poetry is my chief one at present.

But that doesn't blind me to the fact that games are what count. Where should we be without them? And I d.a.m.n well hope the House is not going to get into a finicky, affected state of mind, despising them because they are too slack to play them. That's why you hate them, Betteridge, because you are no good at them. My great ambition is to be captain of this House and win the Three c.o.c.k. Of course the wors.h.i.+p of sport is all right. Our fathers wors.h.i.+pped it, and d.a.m.ned good fellows they were, too. I can't stand you when you talk like this. I am going to find Lovelace; he has got a bit of sense."

The door slammed noisily behind him.

"He is very young," said Betteridge.

"Yes; and full of hopes," murmured Tester. "It is a pity to think he will have to be so soon disillusioned. Very little remains the same for long. Pleasure is very evanescent."

Betteridge looked at him a little curiously.

"I should not have thought you would have found that out," he said.

Tester shrugged.

"Oh, well, you know, even the fastest of us get tired of our licence at times. Byron would have become a Benedictine monk if he had lived to be fifty."

Betteridge smiled, and picking up a Browning from the table sank into an easy-chair to read.

Tester remained looking into the fire. What a fool he had been to give himself away just then. It was his great object never to let anyone see into his soul. He had once shown Caruthers what he was, because he could not bear to see a person of ability wasting himself for want of high ideals. He had tried to show him that there was something above the commonplace routine of life. And in a way he had succeeded. Caruthers often came in in the evenings to discuss poetry with him, and those were some of the happiest moments of his life. He was not sorry that he had poured out his heart to him. Of course Caruthers was still young, was still under the influence of environment. But in time he was sure to realise that athletics were not the aim of life, but only a tavern on the wayside, where we may rest for a little, or which we may pa.s.s by, just as our fancy takes us. If Caruthers saw this at last, he would then have done at least something not altogether vain.

For, after all, what a useless life his had been. The road he had travelled seemed white with the skeletons of broken hopes. In the glowing coals he saw the pageant of his past unroll itself. He had never been quite the normal person. His father was a minor poet, and for as long as he could remember his house had been full of literary people.

Arthur Symons and George Moore had often discussed the relations between art and life across his fireplace. Yeats had told him stories of strange Irish myths; Thomas Hardy had read to him once or twice. He had spent his whole life with men who thought for themselves, who had despised the conventions of their day, and he himself had ceased to believe in anything except what personal experience taught him. He had resolved to find out things for himself. And what, after all, had he discovered?

Little except the vanity of mortal things. In his friends.h.i.+p with Stapleton he had for a term or so found a temporary peace, but it had not been for long. As soon as he achieved anything it seemed to collapse before him. He had at times sought to forget his failures in blind fits of pa.s.sion, but when the fire was burnt out the old world was the old world yet! In books alone he found a lasting comfort. The school looked on him as "quite a decent chap, awfully fast, of course, doesn't care a d.a.m.n what he does, just lives to enjoy himself and have a d.a.m.ned good time." He smiled at the irony of it all. If they only knew! But they could never know. He had made a mistake in saying so much to Betteridge; he must not do it again. He must go on probing everything to discover where, if anywhere, was that complete peace, that perfect beauty that he had set out to find. In the meantime the destiny of his life would unfold itself. He would follow where his inclinations led him.

The evening bell broke into his reverie.

He stretched himself.

"Come on, Betteridge. Let us have a rag to-night."

"Oh, I don't think I will, I am rather sleepy." Betteridge was aware of his position. To Tester being a prefect signified very little.

That night Carter's dormitory was submitted to a most fearful raid.

Water flowed everywhere. Two sheets were ripped and a jug broken. Rudd's bed was upset on the floor with Rudd underneath.

"By Jove, Caruthers," said Lovelace, from Harding's well-behaved dormitory, "that man Tester is some lad."

And Gordon thought, as he saw him laying about him full l.u.s.tily with a pillow, that all his talk about games must be merely a d.a.m.ned affectation. He was really like any ordinary fellow.

When peace was at last restored, and he had led home his victorious forces, Tester laughed quietly to himself, as he watched the moonlight falling across a huge pool of water. He had played his part pretty well.

For the rest of the term life flowed easily with Gordon. There were no further rows with "the Bull"; in fact their row seemed, for a time at any rate, to have brought them closer together. Both seemed anxious to be friends with one another, and on the football field Gordon's play gave really very little cause for complaint. For this term his football reached his highest level. In following seasons he played good games on occasions, but he never equalled the standard he set himself in the Colts. It was one of Gordon's chief characteristics that he usually did well while others failed, and this term the Colts for some reason or other never properly got together. The side kept on being altered. For a week after the row Lovelace was kept out of the side; but it was soon obvious that his presence was absolutely necessary.

"What did I say," said Gordon. "You see, 'the Bull's' madness doesn't last for long. He got a bit fed up with you, Lovelace, so he made himself imagine your football was bad. He can always make himself think what he likes."

"Yes; but it is rather a nuisance," Mansell remarked, "when you realise it is always House men who have to do the Jekyll and Hyde business."