V
Guy went down from Oxford at the end of that term. He took a First Class in History, and then started reading for the Bar.
It always annoyed Walter that Guy had got a first, for Walter felt these distinctions very important. He used to talk of people as first-class intellects or ‘the sort of man who might get a Second in History,’ and I know he considered Guy should belong to the second group. He said once that he didn’t think much of the Oxford History School, because such obviously second-rate people could get firsts in it, and I thought he was thinking of Guy.
I never could see that it mattered very much, or meant very much. George got a first too in his examination, ‘Greats,’ which was the same that Walter did himself, and Hugo only a second. Walter used to say of Hugo later on that he was good material wasted; that he might have been the scholar type if he had ever been taught to work.
Hugo liked the work he did for that examination. He read a lot of Greek philosophy and got excited about it. He used to read it to me in the vacations at Yearsly and translate it as we went along. We read Plato like that one summer, lying in the hay, one particular ‘pike’ of hay, on the way to the Temple. It was wonderful stuff, and the idea of one’s ideas and thoughts being as real as the actual world pleased both of us. I had always felt that, and so did Hugo, but I did not know that serious people thought so too.
Hugo said he would teach me Greek, and we began it that summer, and we went to see Greek plays in London; but I didn’t get very far, and we gave it up after a while, and I read the translations instead.
Guy took some rooms in Clifford’s Inn. He took four rooms, for Hugo was to come and live there too when he went down. Hugo meant at this time to go into the Civil Service.
There had been a great deal of discussion about Hugo’s career. Cousin John had wanted him to go into the Diplomatic Service, but Hugo did not want that. He could not be always so polite, he said, and that made us all laugh, for it was a joke against Hugo that he was too polite; that he could not be rude or disagreeable to anyone, and sometimes people were annoyed with him because of it, because they thought he had agreed with them when he had not.
Then he thought he would like to be a Curator in a museum, in the South Kensington Museum if possible. But George Addington was going in for the Civil Service as soon as he had finished at Oxford, and it was his idea, I think, that Hugo should do so too.
That next Easter we were all in London: George with Mollie, and Hugo with Guy. They all came to Campden Hill Square. Grandmother made them welcome.
They came and went when they liked, and so did I. It was wonderful, I think now, how she managed with us all. We felt perfectly free, we were free, and yet I believe she knew all that was going on, and was watching us and thinking about us a great deal.
In these later years I got to know my grandmother much better. She had seemed, when one was a child, a little alarming, much farther off than Cousin Delia. I don’t think she cared for children naturally, as Cousin Delia did, but now we were older she understood us more, and we her, and we found that she was not alarming at all, but very witty, and full of vitality, and interested in everything that went on.
She was much more lively than Cousin Delia, and I suppose more intellectual.
She read a great deal. Every night when she went to bed she used to read for two hours or more, every sort of book. She had read the French, Italian and English poets, but she did not care much for poetry. She had read the Fathers of the Church and the German Mystics, but she did not care for religion. What she enjoyed most, I think, were the French Encyclopædists, and the French eighteenth-century memoirs. She was, I used to think, very like an eighteenth-century great lady.
When Guy and Hugo came to meals, or George and Mollie, she talked to them quite frankly and simply as though they were contemporaries of her own, but afterwards, almost always, she would go up to her own sitting-room, she had a big sitting-room of her own at the top of the house, and leave them downstairs with me. There was no fuss about it. We never felt hurt that she did not want us, nor yet that she was hurt at our not wanting her. There was no beating about the bush with Grandmother.
‘Aunt Gerry is wonderful,’ Guy once said. ‘It is like talking to a man when you talk to her, not to an old lady.’
She was fonder of Guy than of Hugo. I sometimes thought her a little impatient with Hugo, but I think she loved him too in her own undemonstrative way. George and Mollie pleased her very much.
‘They are refreshing,’ she said the first time they had come to the house. ‘They do me good’; and after a pause while she was polishing her spectacles she put them on, and added, looking at me: ‘I did not know Hugo had so much good sense.’
She meant, I knew, as to choose such sensible friends, and also a little to tease me, for she thought me too uncritical of Hugo. So I only laughed and said: ‘Perhaps it was they who had the good sense,’ and she laughed too and said: ‘Perhaps it was.’
I had defended Hugo at first when she criticized him. That had amused her, and she did it more, but she never was unkind about him. She never said things that really hurt either him or me.