Years of Plenty

by Ivor John Carnegie Brown

XI

In December Martin, who was now seventeen and a half years old, went up to Oxford to compete for a scholarship in Classics. Foskett had encouraged him to wait another year, but John Berrisford held that boys should be free from the pettiness of school life before they were nineteen and advised Martin to go up early: this course would give him another twelve months for Civil Service preparation if necessary. Martin himself had no desire for another year at Elfrey, for, without positively disliking the place, he wanted freedom. His prefecture had brought him more trouble than release, and the Finneys, while they had undoubtedly refined his tastes and broadened his views, had also inevitably rendered him more discontented with the limitations of a society which drove him to silence or to crudity.

Martin was not a remarkable classic and never learned to sympathise with the somewhat pedantic traditions of a classical training, nor had he the imitative faculty necessary for the composition of good prose and verse in Greek or Latin; his work was always sound and often interesting; but he never acquired the infallible dexterity of touch which is the fruit of perfect sympathy with classical modes of thought and expression. His translation into English showed more style than accuracy, and he preferred rather to play loosely with ideas and to follow the literary and social questions arising from a study of the ancient literatures than to apply himself vigorously to pure scholarship. There never had been any doubt about his being an Oxford man. His tastes and abilities, his family connections and his project of entering the Civil Service all pointed in one direction. Moreover, he had somehow been obsessed with a notion that all Cambridge colleges, with the exception of King's and Trinity, were like public schools continued. Had not Heseltine gone to Cambridge? But Oxford would be very different; for how could Oxford, the home of Shelley and Swinburne and Morris, be anything but beautiful and brilliant? Martin was thrilled by the exquisite promise of life: Oxford would be heavenly, and heaven—well, heaven would be all atheism and epigrams. The paradox pleased him and he wondered whether it was the sort of remark he would make to his college debating society next October. But first of all, he sadly remembered, there was this affair of scholarships.

He entered for a small group and gave King's pride of place. It had been his father's college and was in many ways suitable. Its scholarships were neither too hard nor too easy to win. It was a small college in the first rank and commanded universal respect. It prided itself on being successful, not brazenly, like Balliol, but with discretion, unassumingly.

In spite of the opinions of poets, literary gentlemen and writers of guide-books, it is possible to maintain that Oxford is not a nice place in which to live, much less to work. In December it is, on the whole, at its worst, and it was on the second Monday of that month that Martin arrived in the city. Term had ended on the previous Saturday, and only a few undergraduates were to be seen wandering about the deserted streets with a bored and lost expression. Oxford has a double personality: in term it serves efficiently as a crowded pleasure resort; in the vacation it is one of those cities, like Bruges la morte, whose justification is in the past and the memorials of the past. A compromise is fatal and undergraduates must exist in hundreds or not at all. A soft drizzle fell from a yellow, smudgy sky and the streets were covered with a particularly loathsome mud. As he drove down from the station to King's (he was to have rooms in college), Martin was horrified: he felt that he had never seen a more lamentable place. To be rattled in a hansom down George Street and then brought face to face with the front quad of Balliol is not an inspiring method of approach to beauty. But King's was more presentable.

An aged man, who looked dyspeptic and morose, staggered out of the lodge and asked Martin's name: then he summoned a brisk underling, immaculately dressed in a bowler hat and dark blue suit. The underling picked up his bag and guided him up three flights of rickety stairs into a dingy apartment, mainly remarkable for the smallness of its windows. Outside the door Martin had seen the word 'Snutch.'

"Mr Snutch's," said the underling. "These will be yours." Then, to Martin's great surprise and at the expense of his own perfect trousers, he knelt humbly down and lit the fire. It seemed incredible that one so magnificent should stoop to light a fire. Then he said: "Your scout will be in at six, sir," and vanished.

Martin turned to survey the room. On the walls were some extraordinary banners or ribbons, on two of which were the words:

Ahwamkee University.

There were some photographs, plainly American, and a large engraving called 'Love's Pathway.' On the wide expanse of shelves there stood six lonely books—five large volumes on Law and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. At the beginning of each was written: 'E libris Theo. K. Snutch.' Martin was tempted to amend the inscription to 'E libris sex Theo. K. Snutch.' On the mantelpiece were some athletic trophies. Mr Snutch's residence at Oxford, at three hundred a year, was not altogether unjustified: he could terrifically throw the hammer.

Next, Martin found a penny paper called The University and eagerly glanced through it to discover the quality of Oxford journalism. There were jokes about Socialists with red ties and there was an open letter to the varsity heavy-weight boxer. It began, 'Dear Chuckles,' and ended with best wishes for 'the dear little girl who will some day take the ring with you.' The reader was not even spared the allusion to the possible appearance of 'Chucklets.'

"My god!" said Martin. He began to wonder whether he hadn't made a mistake in refusing to go to Cambridge.

The room was depressing, so he put on his overcoat and walked out into the rain: he went down St Olde's to the river. In those days horse-drawn trams still rattled slowly through the streets, making a feeble pretence of antiquity. It angered Martin that in this town, with its new yellow banks and new college buildings, such hypocrisy should go on and that people should confuse the relics of medieval squalor with the works of medieval beauty. He came from a clean town of the hills, and the clinging dirt and the sordid grime and meanness of St Ebbs seemed haunting and insistent. Before Tom Tower and the spacious splendour of Christ Church there was a common slum; he had never pictured Oxford a place of slums. The Thames, too, had been in flood for two or three weeks, and in the playing-fields across the river goal-posts stood up amid acres of water, gauntly desolate. As he passed out along the Abingdon Road he found meadows where the floods had receded and left the grass rotten and stinking. The straggling squalor of Oxford's edge only served to increase his despair: he had expected to find a city with dreaming spires, and so far he had found merely a slum, with yellow gasworks. Only now and then did he catch a glimpse which charmed him. As he turned back and climbed the hill to Carfax he began to loathe the place. But it must be remembered that he had had an inadequate lunch and was under the shadow of an exam.

On returning to Snutch's rooms he found that the fire had almost gone out. With the aid of The University he managed to create a fitful gleam, but it gave no heat. Someone was moving about in the rooms opposite, another scholarship candidate presumably, a rival—damn him! Martin began to think about tea: he did not know what to do and his scout was not coming till six. Ultimately he went out to the Cadena Café: it was full of young women from North Oxford who sat in mackintoshes, feeding with desperate gaiety.

After he came back to Snutch's rooms and read a shilling novel which he had found in the bedder. Soon after six the scout appeared and told Martin that he could dine in the hall at seven: he was a large, grimy man and sniffed prodigiously. Dinner in hall was very trying. Half-a-dozen dons sat at the high table trying to pretend by forced conversation that they were not thoroughly sick of one another: about thirty schoolboys sat shyly on the long benches, apprehensive, miserable. Here and there would be two from the same school, chatting with animation and appearing to be very much in the know about Life and the varsity: elsewhere strangers were huddled together, some silent, others making fitful conversation. Financial distinctions were not forgotten, and the candidates from Public Schools had gravitated to one table, those from Grammar Schools to another. Martin found himself by the side of a red-faced, ingenuous boy, who asked for the water and then said:

"The Harlequins are better than ever this year."

Martin assented, and added: "What's your school?"

"Rugby. What's yours?"

"I'm from Elfrey. Have you anyone else in here?"

"No. We had four up for Balliol this year."

"That's a lot. Are the results out?"

"Yes, this afternoon. We got a schol. and an exhibition."

"That was jolly good."

The dialogue became more and more technical and immensely dull.

The Rugbeian was plainly a bore and after dinner Martin fled from the college: he found a new cinema in Broad Street and went in. Presently some undergraduates who were stopping up for a few days at the end of term came cheerily in and shouted vaguely.

An obsequious manager pleaded with them and they wandered down the gangway looking for company: it did not seem very hard to find. Martin watched their progress with interest and began to wonder whether the girl next him wanted to talk. She had dropped her wrist-bag once and he had picked it up: during the course of the proceedings his eye had been caught by the glitter of a light grey stocking. She wasn't, he had to admit, beautiful. But she was alone, and so was he. Did she, on the other hand, want him to talk? The dropping of the bag might have been an accident. Besides, what did one say? Martin cursed his inexperience and racked his brains for a conversational lead. He could hardly make some remark about the films: that would be obvious and heavy. Something light was wanted: but what? Why on earth couldn't she drop the bag again? He would take the hint this time. His mind became a blank and he felt acutely miserable. At the end of the film he rose and walked away in despair. He stopped at the back of the hall and noticed one of the varsity men glance round and then move quickly into his place before the lights were again turned out. Martin returned to college, read some more of Snutch's novel, and went to bed.

Till Friday night Martin was kept hard at work doing papers in the college hall. On Tuesday morning he had to write an essay on the relations of the artist and the State, an obvious subject, perhaps, but pleasing. It was the only paper which he enjoyed. Afterwards he was kept hard at work with Unseens and Compositions. Never in his life had he felt more irritable or more intellectually impotent. The yellow blanket of mist hung over Oxford continually: the hall smelled abominably of stale gravy and recent meals, and, worst of all, the pens supplied to such as did not bring their own were quills; consequently the stuffy room was never free from a maddening scratch and squeak. A youth with a sloping brow and waving, faultless hair who sat next Martin made great play with his quill: he was a 'dog' whose doggishness took the form of a graceful abandon in his dress; he wore soft collars and long woolly waistcoats and dilapidated pumps. He held his quill between his first and second fingers, and he wrote splashily with brave flourishes and a spasmodic squeak; also he had a habit of marching out majestically half-an-hour before the time for a paper was finished. Martin wondered whether this implied that he was immensely bad or immensely good: he feared the latter. Altogether he was a fascinating and disconcerting neighbour, and one morning Martin, struggling with verses that would not 'come,' wanted to kill him.

Another cause of depression was the presence of boys

from Grammar Schools. Martin was no snob, but he could not keep himself unspotted from Public School tradition, and he felt that these smug-looking youths were rivals in a way that the dull Rugbeian never could be. He was certain that they were far better scholars than he was, that they had worked like slaves and could translate anything ever written in Greek or Latin: he might have escaped much mental suffering had he known that, even if they had been so brilliant (and in reality they were amazingly dull), the dons are, with a few exceptions, well rooted in class tradition and are not going to sacrifice the Public Schools on the altar of modern honesty. But Martin did not know these things, and when he saw the Grammar School candidates parading the town with little crested caps on the backs of their heads and greasy curls sticking bravely up in front, the natural dislike of the rival was fused with the Public School man's loathing of inferior form. There was one unforgettable person who came every day to King's wearing a black overcoat and black kid gloves: his cap had a little silver button gleaming over the inevitable curl. He looked both wise and good.

On the Thursday evening Martin glanced through the rough copy of his Latin verse. There he found—

"via strata patebat
Hostibus; ardentes surgunt ducemque sequuntur."

True that the lines did not sound beautiful: in a copy of twenty-two lines you must have one or two dull moments. But "via strata" and "ducem"—two false quantities in a line and a half. How could he have done it? He flung the rough copy into the fire and swore violently. Silver Button wouldn't make false quantities: Silver Button would have learned about 'dux' and 'duco' when he was twelve—so had Martin. But then Silver Button wouldn't, couldn't, forget. Martin was convinced now that, as far as a scholarship was concerned, he might as well never have entered.

He wandered morosely into the streets: it started to rain and he took refuge in the cinema. For half-an-hour he watched the films and, more particularly, an amorous couple in front. A girl came and sat on his right: she was distinctly attractive and her chin, poised daintily in the air, conveyed an exquisite invitation: the rest of her face was hidden by hat. He began to feel, as before, self-conscious and miserable. This time he would speak, must speak ... but how? The couple in front had reached their limit in proximity. Suddenly her foot touched his and with a surreptitious glance he saw below the brim of that entrancing hat. She was perfect. She had taken off her glove and her hand lay on her lap: before Martin knew what he was doing, he had taken it and pressed it. The girl turned abruptly round, snatched her hand away, and said coldly:

"Please leave me alone."

Martin obeyed, blushing furiously. "I'm very sorry," he muttered, but she took no notice. He sat gazing in front of him, humiliated and tortured. What a fool he had been! Why hadn't he said something and made an opening?

The film clicked monotonously on. One fact alone flamed across his mind: he must get out before the film was over. He couldn't endure the raising of the lights. But either he would have to crush past the girl on his right or else go out to the left, a journey which would involve forcing his way through a long row of stout people. Both alternatives were unpleasant.

The film was ending. The music had ceased to ripple and begun to sob, always a proof of impending embraces. The hero and heroine were rolling great lurid eyes at one another. The lights went up. Martin pushed his way out to the left past the stout and sulky: then he hurried back through the rain to Snutch's gloomy chambers. There was nothing to do but to contemplate his own blunders classic and modern. He told himself that he had made a rotten shot and received a nasty snub. If he had only been aiming at something worth having, he wouldn't have minded. But what, after all, was the use of a girl to him? And why on earth had he wanted to grab her sticky hand—for it had been sticky. He knew now that he hadn't really wanted to do it, for its own sake: he had wanted to do it because other people did it. Now it all seemed so hugely silly. "I suppose love's all right," he thought to himself. "But this hand and kiss business is piffle."

On Friday evening Martin returned to Elfrey in a state of advanced pessimism. Early in the next week he learned that he had been elected to a classical scholarship at King's College. He gazed blankly at the telegram and the words 'via strata' and 'ducem' flashed before his mind.

It was quite incredible, but it was true.