Years of Plenty Part 19

Lawrence opened violently a bottle of Munich beer and drained the contents. Then he gave a vast sigh of relief, pulled out his pipe and stood expansively before the fire, exposing, unconsciously, a large gap of s.h.i.+rt between his waistcoat and the grey flannel trousers whose sole support lay in their tightness.

"It isn't G.o.d that matters," he declared. "It's the G.o.dites. They're worse than ever."

"They've at least begun to move with the times."

"Exactly," said Martin, coming in as usual to a.s.sist Lawrence. "They swallow everything new and say they meant it all the time. I don't mind good old burn-the-devil bigots, but this up-to-date Interpreting and Restatement and Revaluation and Earnest Wash, it makes me sick.

Why can't they give up their tribal deity and do something sensible?"

"You're so beastly crude," answered Rendell. "Oxford isn't exactly a brainless place, and it's full of religion."

"It's full of a washed-out, watery, emasculate ghost of a faith," said Martin. "They daren't say what they really do mean for fear of giving the show away. So they talk about Evolution and the Unknowable and 'may be something in it.'"

"The religion of the Oxford don," said Chard magnificently from his corner, "is the sickly b.a.s.t.a.r.d of nervousness and inertia."

"I'll give you a quid to say that at the Union," said Martin. But Chard valued his career at more than a sovereign.

"Aren't you men a little out of date?" interrupted Davenant.

"Chivvying priests and kings was about 1870, wasn't it?"

"Exactly," Rendell cried in triumph. "You've done for priests and kings. n.o.body believes in them any more. They've collapsed, and by collapsing become infinitely stronger. Bradlaugh's brigade never foresaw that, when you take away nominal power, you begin to create real power. The weakest side always wins in the end."

"Don't talk Chestertonian drivel," growled Lawrence. "n.o.body believes it."

"It's quite true. Religion is stronger than ever just because it's weaker."

"The last flicker," said Martin.

Then the conversation, having reached an impa.s.se, turned of necessity and they were off once more upon matters episcopal.

"I don't see why a bishop should get thousands a year while the curates are half starved," said Lawrence.

"They don't spend it on themselves," retorted Rendell.

"Only on palaces and motors and flummery. No, my boy, it's all bunk.u.m.

Look at the fortunes they leave." Lawrence had collected a list of episcopal fortunes which he read with glee upon every possible occasion. It was an excellent array of figures, starting well up in the hundred thousands.

"Oh, chuck it," said Rendell. "We've heard all this before."

But Lawrence read irrepressibly on.

"What about your needle's eye now?" he roared.

"Oh, don't be a child," said Rendell.

"That's all you ever say. Childis.h.!.+ You with your Athanasian Creed and incense and swindling priests. Ever been to Notre Dame and seen the advertis.e.m.e.nts? Forty days' purgatory remitted in return for so many prayers! And you call me childis.h.!.+" Lawrence had a fine flow of metaphors and expletives. He had been known to continue one sentence for ten minutes, his oratorical method being to subst.i.tute copulas for full stops. He began jerkily, it is true. But once the lumbering coach was set moving nothing could withstand its impetus.

Rendell yielded and began to discuss with Davenant the personality of Christ. Lawrence continued roaring at no one in particular. At last he sat heavily down in his arm-chair, so heavily that one of its legs gave way. He tore off the broken member and brandished it wildly, as a symbol of his att.i.tude to all things episcopal.

As usual it was Chard who closed the discussion.

"Davenant's faith," he said, "makes me think of a mendicant professor of aesthetics and Rendell's of the first secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners (Nazareth branch). I move the question be put."

His advice was taken.

"Beer," said Lawrence. "My G.o.d, more beer."

And so the evenings would begin.

III

Incredibly the Push were blind to their amazing superficiality. Even had they suffered from an inclination to be serious, life came so easily and so rapidly that it would have been impossible to do anything but play with it. So they trifled with wisdom and trifled rightly.

For when a man is only nineteen and has enough to eat and drink, and more than enough to read and say, it were a crime to stop in thought and laboriously dam the pleasant shallows of an easy-going stream.

Alike in the winter nights by Lawrence's fire or by the lingering twilights of early summer when they threaded a maze of back-waters or lay in the cool fastness of the college garden listening to the wind in the great elms or the tinkle of a distant piano, they built great castles of argument, flimsy and fantastic piles untouched by reality and doomed to fade away at the coming of Experience. They talked of great things and small, of G.o.d and Woman and sometimes of Man, of futures and careers, of the dons, of the college, of the varsity teams, of books and plays and poets, of the coldness of the pretty girl in this shop and of the wantonness of the plain girl in that.

They lived with an excellent method. In the mornings they lay in bed, thought about breakfast, ate breakfast, and read the papers. In the junior common-room there were all the dailies and on Wednesdays there were _Punch_, _The Tatler_, _The Sketch_, and _The Bystander_, on Sat.u.r.days the weekly reviews. They were catholic in the reading, but, if the supply happened to give out, they could always consider what to do in the afternoon. By that time it was one o'clock and they lunched frugally and together. In the afternoon they took their various amus.e.m.e.nts. Perhaps Lawrence and Martin played rugger, while Chard and Davenant strolled round Addison Walk. Rendell insisted on playing hockey, insisted in the face of opposition.

"You can't play hockey," said Martin. "It's no game for a gentleman."

"It's quite a good game," Rendell apologised.

"It may be all right for internationals who dart about and toss the ball in the air and catch it on the end of their sticks, but it's no game for incapables like you."

"I'm in the team anyhow. And you, by the way, are winning renown as the worst wing three-quarter in Oxford."

"That is probably true," Martin admitted. "But it doesn't destroy my contention that hockey is a sc.r.a.ppy, uncomfortable business and only good enough for men who can't get into any other teams."

"You're a stark old reactionary," retorted Rendell. "Hockey is the game of the future. There'll be a 'full Blue' for it in a year or two.

And don't make the obvious remark."

Martin didn't. But he continued to jeer when Rendell went off in the rain and came back with bruised s.h.i.+ns and perhaps a black eye. This only encouraged Rendell to take the game very seriously, to turn out always, and to run like a hare down his wing, whereas Martin and Lawrence treated this rugger team with disdain and only played when it pleased them. The secretary, being hard up for players, could not drop them altogether, for even Martin was better than his subst.i.tute. In the summer Rendell played cricket as seriously as he had played his hockey, so that he just gained a place in the college eleven. Martin played sometimes for the tennis six and the other three fled, when it was warm enough and at first when it was not--for such is the way of freshers--to navigate the Cherwell in the communal punt.

In the evenings they dined out as often as their college would let them and went to meetings of clubs or, on the rare occasions when there was a play worth seeing, to the theatre. Work they neglected, thoroughly and with a good heart. Chard and Davenant, who were to take modern history, both failed in Pa.s.s Mods in March, but pa.s.sed in the summer after a fortnight's reading. The other three had resolved that Honour Mods could easily be squared in a long vac and two terms: they did not realise that a year of idleness (or nearly two years, for none of them had worked since gaining their scholars.h.i.+ps) creates a habit of mind which cannot easily be shaken off. Two stiff terms are easier to contemplate than to achieve. Martin, indeed, had his uncle's blessing, for John Berrisford had told him that the first year was meant to broaden one's point of view: it struck him as a joyous process, this broadening of one's point of view.

His tutor, Reggie Petworth, he did not like. Petworth turned out to be a "neo-cardiac" of the first water: even then he hadn't the decency to be whole-hearted in his heartiness and wavered between complete allegiance with Hodges and the college 'right' and a feeble attempt to conciliate the 'left' as represented by Lawrence and Martin. Petworth had come from Balliol with the Hertford, the Ireland, and a Philosophy of Fun. It was Fun to write jolly compositions and Fun to set proses out of George Meredith which bore no relation to cla.s.sical thought or idiom and couldn't conceivably be translated into reasonable Latin or Greek. It was Fun to be a High Churchman, Fun to talk about priests and ma.s.ses, Fun to date your letters by feasts of the Church, Fun to be a Liberal and believe in the people. Fun to have bad cigarettes sent from a remote Oriental town because its monarch was a Balliol man, Fun to collect things without sense or purpose, Fun, in fact, to pretend to be a child.

"One doesn't mind Davenant pretending to be decadent now and then,"

said Martin to Lawrence, "because decadence always depends on posing for its real point. A man isn't a decadent unless he knows he's a decadent and plays up to it. But childhood is rather different, and I don't see why blighters like Reggie should try and ape it."

"Just the Balliol touch," said Lawrence.

Martin was supposed to show up two compositions a week to Reggie Petworth and to do occasional translation papers. He attended with some regularity to make up for his complete absence from lectures.

Petworth exhorted him mildly to make more strenuous efforts and told him what Fun Demosthenes could be if one read the private speeches, about mining rights and water-courses and a.s.saults. Whereupon Martin was coldly polite and retired to renew his conversations about the world at large, while Petworth would find a 'jolly' man and walk out to eat lunch at Beckley, saying 'What Fun!' if he saw a pig with pleasant markings.

To Martin, as he lazily reclined one September morning in the black woods behind The Steading, the past was a vision of undimmed radiance.

Oxford had threatened but it had not fulfilled: rather it had grudged him nothing of its plenty. It had given him friends (miraculously the Push had not quarrelled) and views and a year of fine living. He knew now how tainted by the poison of exams had been his first impressions of that grey and gracious city, he knew that it was not just a Midland town with a liability to fogs and floods. Also he knew that his uncle had been wrong when he said that the place didn't matter and only the inst.i.tution counted. For he had even learned to love the lambent tongues of mist that crept stealthily from the river to the walls of Corpus and Merton and drifted over roofs and towers to the noise and splendour of the High. The myriad lights of rooms piled on rooms flas.h.i.+ng out into a blue dusk of winter, the reds and greys of Holywell, the clatter of the Corn and the bells that told unfailingly the hours of the night were now in his memory the blended symbols of a growing intimacy. He had found out c.u.mnor Hurst and Besselsleigh, and the sweep of the downs clear-cut against the sky, and the old towns to the West, Burford and Fairford and all the Chippings of the Wolds. But clearest of all in his memory were the canoe voyages made by Rendell and Lawrence and himself at the close of the summer term. Then, while a horde of wealthy trippers came to Oxford to dance and flirt and hold sumptuous revel, they pierced every dim recess of the upper river and probed the secrets of the Evenlode. They had bathed in the morning and in the afternoon and again by moonlight, running in wild nakedness over strewn hay to recover warmth. At Bablock Hythe they had eaten cold ducks and drunk cider in gallons: they had lain for hours on the Long Leas gazing into an infinite dome of stars and waiting for the idle nightingale. And Lawrence had nearly murdered Rendell for quoting Matthew Arnold.