VII
On an evening of early June Martin, Rendell and Lawrence punted up a backwater of the Thames. It was cool on the water's surface and a lingering remnant of breeze stole across the silent meadows and played gently with the willows. They had escaped from Oxford and the gas-works, from gramophones and the university boathouse. It was a special haunt of their own to which they had come, one of Hinksey's unpathed waters, very narrow and remote. At length they made fast to a stump of wood and smoked in peace.
It was all over. They had lived through a week of sweltering agony, of darting to the Schools in cap and gown and stuffy clothes, of darting out again to see how many words they had got wrong in their translation. Such is the dignity of Greats. Abiding by their plans, they had worked their philosophy according to schedule and answered their questions on grimly practical lines. They hadn't made bold to know about Beauty.
"Well," said Rendell, "that's the end of that."
"What?" yawned Martin. He was tired alike by his exertions and recent celebration of the end.
"Of everything."
"Edified?"
"I think so. It's been rather majestic somehow. To have to know about everything and keep a theory about every branch of thought and action. One doesn't do it, but it's rather good to think one is supposed to do it."
"Depressing enough before the event," Martin remembered nights of wild battling with insoluble problems and days when he had gazed in despair at papers recently set and realised his complete incapacity to inform the examiners about modality or the legal aspects of the Cæsar-Pompey quarrel.
"You used to get jolly black?" said Lawrence, remembering silences and outbursts or the lonely walks that Martin sometimes took.
"It's all very well for you," retorted Martin. "You may have to look forward to dull sort of work, but you're secure enough. I'm just beginning this business of getting a job and it's poor fun. I suppose it means India."
"You'll get a decent screw," said Rendell by way of comfort.
"And come back without a liver or an idea."
"Except about curry and cigars."
"I can't imagine our gloomy Martin as a sun-dried bureaucrat," Lawrence remarked. "But I suppose he'll have punkahs and khitmutgars and syces and be the devil of a chap. I daresay it's all right when you're there."
"There are few people who loathe the British Empire more cordially than I do," said Martin. "But there seems to be no way of keeping clear of it. Anyway I've quite settled not to starve as a journalist. Sooner the White Man's Burden than that."
"Anyhow," said Rendell, still eager to comfort, "we don't know anything about the Burden, do we? There may be something in it."
"Well, one thing is quite plain," asserted Martin, "there's no charity going as far as I am concerned. If I have to go and live in a dirty hot hole I go there because I can't get a decent living otherwise. I go on the make and I'll resign as soon as I can get the thousand that they're always chattering about. None of your Burden for me."
"To gather from what one sees," said Lawrence, "the Burden doesn't weigh very heavily on the shoulders of the big pots. They seem to do themselves pretty well."
"Of course they do. That's what they go for. How many varsity men would go abroad if they could live in comfort and get the same wage at home? Not ten per cent. And who can blame them? India pays, and it pays for hard, dangerous, useful work. I don't mind men going for the pay, but I do mind journalists blithering about their self-devotion in taking up the noble load."
"All the same," said Rendell cheerily, "you've quite a good chance for the Home."
"I wish the deuce I had," sighed Martin. "If I'd worked all the time I might have done it. But it's too late now. I don't really know anything and will be lucky to get India. Come on, let's move a bit."
During the next few days Martin managed to forget the looming menace of the East. The heat remained and they lived on the river, bathing and sleeping and feeding in turn. And then here were a couple of farewell dinners. The champagne flowed and Holywell was full of rushing people and strange noises. The passing of Lawrence was worthy of his whole career and on his last night a stalwart cortège bore him like a warrior to his rest.
After the end of term Martin stayed up to work. July was a month of lonely misery, of dust and bad tennis and the cramming of English Literature. At last the time for his Greats viva came and he walked down to the Schools with Lawrence, there to be asked by a nervous little man whether he thought things or thought thoughts. He at once informed the nervous little man that this was an idiotic question and that Descartes ... his knowledge of Descartes was overwhelming. Lawrence was dealt with by a truculent, red-faced man who asked him minute questions about the wanderings of the Phocæans. Lawrence just smiled wisely and was sent away. Rendell's turn came later. He was asked about the foundations of morality and maintained that while Kant was very wise and venerable he was also very wrong. But he remained respectful of Kant. One can only be offensive to J. S. Mill in Oxford nowadays, but about him one can say anything.
Once more Rendell took a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third. It was the history that kept them apart. Their philosophy had been uniformly good; Mr Cuggy was filled with pride and wrote to congratulate them all: whereat they wondered what would have happened if they had continued to cling to that philosophic rock, the Absolute. Yet it was nice of him to write. That was the worst of Cuggy: you couldn't dislike him.
From an Oxford of glaring streets and searching, irresistible dust Martin went up to London to seek his fortune at Burlington House. Later he remembered that August as a month of blazing heat and tired hands and aching head. He remembered a gloomy place shaped like a theatre where morose men asked him if he had a buff book and tore his papers from under his pen when time was up. There were days of solid labour and nights of anxiety spent with the text-books for to-morrow's exams: and there were unforgettable crowds of candidates sitting upon the steps before each paper and going over their notes for a last time with feverish futility. He remembered hating the people from Wren's as he had hated the Grammar School boys in his scholarship exams, jealously loathing and dreading their preparedness and notes and iron methods. He remembered the filthy temper he was in and his contempt for the scrubby little man who sat next to him and muttered to himself incessantly. Martin had crammed Blankney's notes on the Attic constitution because he had heard a rumour that Blankney was examining, and he remembered a ceaseless effort to display knowledge which he did not possess and to scrape up marks, marks, marks....
But the exams brought him also to Freda.
He found her pale and tired and more fragile than ever: he found her working from ten to six and idling despondently in the evenings. Quite obviously she was not the woman he had known in Devonshire.
Then she was strong and at her ease, full of mysterious confidence, rejoicing in life and her ability to cope with it. He had been to her merely an undergraduate, nicely foolish, he had amused her and she had read his letters, even answered them. He had chattered of affection and she had laughed him gently to scorn.
Now he came to her as a man in a world where men were scarce and men were needed. But it was Freda who had changed, not Martin. The transformation of the boy into the man was due to the heat of summer and the click of typewriters. To one deafened with the city's roar Martin brought memories of perfect woods and lonely pines that stood out against emptiness, starkly black. They used to go out together in the evenings, to Richmond, to Putney Heath, to Hampstead. They went where the others went because they were as the others, hard-worked, tired-out, desperately needing one another. There was no glory of passion in their evenings. Street lamps did not flame as flowers of the East, trees did not tower like giants luring them with soft voices, water was still water. Earth and sky had not altered for them: it had not altered for the others who wandered in the same places.
One Monday at half-past five Martin hurried out of Burlington House after his second paper in English Literature. Never in his life had he written more in six hours: he had drained his soul of platitude and pretence, discreetly praising and blaming men whom he had never read, never, thank God, would read, all the remoter 'C's,' Cowley, Cowper, Crabbe.
His nerves were all frayed. He hated the statues of Liebnitz and Locke and Plato ... what had Platonism to do with that sordid spot? He hated the Burlington Arcade with its lingering odour of stale scent: a woman smiled at him horribly and he hated her. He hated Piccadilly because it was dusty and deserted, and he hated the tea he drank because it was too hot and there were flies on the table. He hated himself for not remembering a quotation. How plain it all seemed now, and yet he had missed it.
He met Freda at half-past six at Waterloo and they went down to Thames Ditton. The river was crowded with punts and canoes and boats of every kind, but they joined the press. As darkness fell lights began to glitter like jewels across the water. Here and there a Chinese lantern swung on a prow, the glowing end of a cigarette flickered and was gone. Ripples of laughter floated from a nook where people supped, the popping of a cork, the tinkling of distant music. But if there was not solitude or silence, there was at least a breeze that shook the parched leaves and whispered in bough and rush. Martin found a vacant berth deeply curtained with bushes and low-hanging trees and there they made fast the punt and lingered.
They talked a little of his exam and of his prospects. And then they talked of her prospects.
"You're too fine for it," he said suddenly. It was what he had said so often before, but now she was no longer maternal or cheerily scornful of his protests. She yielded alike to his thought and to his touch. Never had she so yielded before. For Martin the world became a great, black silence: the only thing he knew was the closeness of her. That she trusted him, and wanted him was joy: that she was there, beside him, his, was magic. Because she for the first time yielded, he for the first time forgot. Never before had he quite escaped from himself, from considering the impression that he was likely to be making, from worrying fears and self-conscious timidity. Now he was free. He was aware only of the intangible fragrance of her hair, the warmth and movement of her body, the curve and rhythm of her limbs, the instant claim of her fragility. Everything became different.
At the end of the month Freda had a fortnight's holiday and went to an aunt in Yorkshire. Martin had arranged to meet Lawrence and Rendell at Seatoller in the Lakes. He went in a bitter mood, hungry for Freda, physically stale, and hopeless. But the traditional rain never came and soon they knew every crag of Honister and Grey Knotts, of Glaramara, of The Gables and the Scawfells, of the Langdale Pikes. The challenge of wind and weather on the hills and the flaming splendour of Borrowdale in autumn drove apprehension and despair from his soul. He learned that in some places a man cannot be morbid.
On an evening of late September they were playing three-handed auction. A telegram arrived from Devonshire. The commissioners had sent the result to his home address, it seemed.
Martin put down his hand and tore open the envelope. He had passed fifty-first on the list.
"Looks like India," he said quietly.
Neither Rendell nor Lawrence knew what to say. He had wanted the Home service, they knew, and fifty-first would not get that for him. They muttered congratulations self-consciously.
Martin took up his hand once more. It was solidly black.
"Five hearts?" he said. "Five royals."
The opposition collapsed and he made his tricks.
They played late, thinking only of the cards. Martin's career was settled, his life mapped out, his whole future determined by that message, and they talked of rubbers and pence. If he had miraculously passed in first or failed altogether they would have discussed it, but, because he had achieved the expected mediocrity, by tacit convention they were silent. The cards were really more important.