There was not a second to lose; he must begin at once. He would write something—something that would last, solid, hard, shining. . . .
«Damn them all! I will do it, I can . . .»
There were writing materials and a table in his room. He selected a pen— with a Relief nib he would be able to go on for hours without getting tired—and a large square sheet of writing-paper.
«HATCH HOUSE, BLAYBURY, WILTS.
Station: Cogham, 3 miles; Nobes Monacorum, 4.5 miles.»
Stupid of people to have their stationery printed in red, when black or blue is so much nicer! He inked over the letters.
He held up the paper to the light; there was a watermark, «Pimlico Bond.» What an admirable name for the hero of a novel! Pimlico Bond. . . .
«There’s be-eef in the la-arder And du-ucks in the pond; Crying dilly dilly, dilly dilly . . .»
He bit the end of his pen. «What I want to get,» he said to himself, «is something very hard, very external. Intense emotion, but one will somehow have got outside it.» He made a movement of hands, arms, and shoulders, tightening his muscles in an effort to express to himself physically that hardness and tightness and firmness of style after which he was struggling.
He began to draw on his virgin paper. A woman, naked, one arm lifted over her head, so that it pulled up her breast by that wonderful curving muscle that comes down from the shoulder. The inner surface of the thighs, remember, is slightly concave. The feet, seen from the front, are always a difficulty.
It would never do to leave that about. What would the servants think? He turned the nipples into eyes, drew heavy lines for nose, mouth, and chin, slopped on the ink thick; it made a passable face now—though an acute observer might have detected the original nudity. He tore it up into very small pieces.
A crescendo booming filled the house. It was the gong. He looked at his watch. Lunch-time, and he had done nothing. O God! . . .
III
IT was dinner-time on the last evening of Guy’s leave. The uncovered mahogany table was like a pool of brown unruffled water within whose depths flowers and the glinting shapes of glass and silver hung dimly reflected. Mr. Petherton sat at the head of the board, flanked by his brother Roger and Jacobsen. Youth, in the persons of Marjorie, Guy, and George White, had collected at the other end. They had reached the stage of dessert.
«This is excellent port,» said Roger, sleek and glossy like a well-fed black cob under his silken clerical waistcoat. He was a strong, thick-set man of about fifty, with a red neck as thick as his head. His hair was cropped with military closeness; he liked to set a good example to the boys, some of whom showed distressing «aesthetic «tendencies and wore their hair long.
«I’m glad you like it. I mayn’t touch it myself, of course. Have another glass.» Alfred Petherton’s face wore an expression of dyspeptic melancholy. He was wishing he hadn’t taken quite so much of that duck.
«Thank you, I will.» Roger took the decanter with a smile of satisfaction. «The tired schoolmaster is worthy of his second glass. White, you look rather pale; I think you must have another.» Roger had a hearty, jocular manner, calculated to prove to his pupils that he was not one of the slimy sort of parsons, not a Creeping Jesus.
There was an absorbing conversation going on at the youthful end of the table. Secretly irritated at having been thus interrupted in the middle of it, White turned round and smiled vaguely at Roger.
«Oh, thank you, sir,» he said, and pushed his glass forward to be filled. The «sir «slipped out unawares; it was, after all, such a little while since he had been a schoolboy under Roger’s dominion.
«One is lucky,» Roger went on seriously, «to get any port wine at all now. I’m thankful to say I bought ten dozen from my old college some years ago to lay down; otherwise I don’t know what I should do. My wine merchant tells me he couldn’t let me have a single bottle. Indeed, he offered to buy some off me, if I’d sell. But I wasn’t having any. A bottle in the cellar is worth ten shillings in the pocket these days. I always say that port has become a necessity now one gets so little meat. Lambourne! you are another of our brave defenders; you deserve a second glass.»
«No, thanks,» said Guy, hardly looking up. «I’ve had enough.» He went on talking to Marjorie — about the different views of life held by the French and the Russians.
Roger helped himself to cherries. «One has to select them carefully,» he remarked for the benefit of the unwillingly listening George. «There is nothing that gives you such stomach-aches as unripe cherries.»
«I expect you’re glad, Mr. Petherton, that holidays have begun at last?»said Jacobsen.
«Glad? I should think so. One is utterly dead beat at the end of the summer term. Isn’t one, White? «
White had taken the opportunity to turn back again and listen to Guy’s conversation; recalled, like a dog who has started off on a forbidden scent, he obediently assented that one did get tired at the end of the summer term.
«I suppose,» said Jacobsen, «you still teach the same old things—Caesar, Latin verses, Greek grammar, and the rest? We Americans can hardly believe that all that still goes on.»
«Thank goodness,» said Roger, «we still hammer a little solid stuff into them. But there’s been a great deal of fuss lately about new curriculums and so forth. They do a lot of science now and things of that kind, but I don’t believe the children learn anything at all. It’s pure waste of time.»
«So is all education, I dare say,» said Jacobsen lightly.
«Not if you teach them discipline. That’s what’s wanted—discipline. Most of these little boys need plenty of beating, and they don’t get enough now. Besides, if you can’t hammer knowledge in at their heads, you can at least beat a little in at their tails.»
«You’re very ferocious, Roger,» said Mr. Petherton, smiling. He was feeling better; the duck was settling down.
«No, it’s the vital thing. The best thing the war has brought us is discipline. The country had got slack and wanted tightening up.» Roger’s face glowed with zeal.
From the other end of the table Guy’s voice could be heard saying, «Do you know Cesar Franck’s ‘ Dieu s’avance a travers la lande ‘? It’s one of the finest bits of religious music I know.»
Mr. Petherton’s face lighted up; he leaned forward. «No,» he said, throwing his answer unexpectedly into the midst of the young people’s conversation. «I don’t know it; but do you know this? Wait a minute.» He knitted his brows, and his lips moved as though he were trying to recapture a formula. «Ah, I’ve got it. Now, can you tell me this? The name of what famous piece of religious music do I utter when I order an old carpenter, once a Liberal but now a renegade to Conservatism, to make a hive for bees?»
Guy gave it up; his guardian beamed delightedly.
«Hoary Tory, oh, Judas! Make a bee-house,» he said. «Do you see? Oratorio Judas Maccabeus»
Guy could have wished that this bit of flotsam from Mr. Petherton’s sportive youth had not been thus washed up at his feet. He felt that he had been peeping indecently close into the dark backward and abysm of time.
«That was a good one,» Mr. Petherton chuckled. «I must see if I can think of some more.»
Roger, who was not easily to be turned away from his favourite topic, waited till this irrelevant spark of levity had quite expired, and continued: «It’s a remarkable and noticeable fact that you never seem to get discipline combined with the teaching of science or modern languages. Who ever heard of a science master having a good house at a school? Scientists’ houses are always bad.»
«How very strange! «said Jacobsen.
«Strange, but a fact. It seems to me a great mistake to give them houses at all if they can’t keep discipline. And then there’s the question of religion. Some of these men never come to chapel except when they’re on duty. And then, I ask you, what happens when they prepare their boys for Confirmation? Why, I’ve known boys come to me who were supposed to have been prepared by one or other of these men, and, on asking them, I’ve found that they know nothing whatever about the most solemn facts of the Eucharist.—May I have some more of those excellent cherries please, White? —Of course, I do my best in such cases to tell the boys what I feel personally about these solemn things. But there generally isn’t the time; one’s life is so crowded; and so they go into Confirmation with only the very haziest knowledge of what it’s all about. You see how absurd it is to let anyone but the classical men have anything to do with the boys’ lives.»
«Shake it well, dear,» Mr. Petherton was saying to his daughter, who had come with his medicine.
«What is that stuff?» asked Roger,
«Oh, it’s merely my peptones. I can hardly digest at all without it, you know.»
«You have all my sympathies. My poor colleague, Flexner, suffers from chronic colitis. I can’t imagine how he goes on with his work.»
«No, indeed. I find I can do nothing strenuous.»
Roger turned and seized once more on the
