From a long vacation spent with the historians and philosophers and from the clash and challenge of autumnal moors Martin came back to rooms in Holywell and the school of Literæ Humaniores. From clean winds and open skies he came back to a gentle greyness or to smudgy days when the rain settled upon the river valley with cruel insistence and on parting left floods and vapours and steamy streets. From working at his ease he came back to work with distaste.
To begin with, he was afraid. The future was big with exams. In eight months his Oxford finals would be upon him, in ten months he would be attempting to satisfy the Civil Service Commissioners. The torture of it! It was all very well for Lawrence, whom a wealthy uncle would make into a chartered accountant, for Rendell, who was to be an amateur barrister and a professional Lib-Lab-Soc, for Chard, with his assured career and Front-bench-in-a-year-or-two prospects; well enough too for Davenant, who had money enough to maintain an adequate, even a graceful, existence while he wrote about the things of art. But for Martin there was only the midnight oil and the wondering about marks.
And he felt helpless. He didn't want to be a Civil Servant, even at home. And as for India or the Straits! He wanted to be in London with the rest of them, keeping up the old ideas and intimacies and enthusiasms. If he had only felt that such a life was absolutely impossible, he would have taken his fate more graciously. But it seemed that with an effort, with daring, he might get out of it all and find a job that would keep him in London without starvation: but he hadn't the pluck to look for the job, and he was content to drift on the wave of chance. Circumstance was moulding his life, whereas he ought to be moulding circumstance. Why couldn't he be strong and do things? He despised his puny helplessness and cowardly drifting: the more he gazed into himself the less did he see to admire. Naturally this did not improve his work.
He lived with Rendell and Lawrence and Chard in a good house in Holywell: Davenant had gone down. Chard shared a sitting-room with Rendell, and they both worked with vigour, being men of sense and ambition. Upstairs in a great low-raftered room Martin dwelled with Lawrence. He began by labouring with a fond frenzy, but he soon fell into his companion's easier ways and sat by the window watching the passers-by. Holywell is a sound and regular street. You either belong to it or you don't. And if you do belong to it everybody knows that you belong to it and has a notion of your habits and your time-table. Martin and Lawrence soon found out about everyone, and their chief topic of conversation was the late appearance of this man or the frequent journeys of another, the new hat of the girl opposite or the names and nature of the young women who came hustling out of St Cross Road. They despised Chard and Rendell for their ignorance and wilful neglect of the street and its population.
It was a soothing occupation to watch folk come and go. Soothing, too, was the soft glory of the street itself as it curved away to the Broad with its sombre harmony of pink and grey. Behind the sweeping splendour of the way itself might rise a sunset sky of winter, blue with the lustre of steel, a tower of strong darkness above the fading glow. And then lamps would twinkle and windows pour golden floods into the road and a man would think about having tea. All good men live in Holywell when they "go out."
But it was not always thus. Often everything was ugly, and Martin had indigestion after lunch and thought once more of May Williams. He hadn't seen her at all: perhaps she had escaped from Botley. Really he didn't care: astonishing how unattractive was the memory of that affair! No, May had not been good enough, but there was a girl who walked up and down the street: she too had roses in her hat, but the colour was not the same. And she was different, remote and inaccessible. Martin said nothing and did nothing, but he always looked out when she passed on her way to and from shops: it gave him more pain than pleasure to watch her pass by, and yet he kept on looking.
And then there was Mr Cuggy. Cuggy was Martin's tutor in philosophy and had the reputation of being the most muddled thinker in Oxford: his claims were based on a certain article in Mind which had broken all records (already high in English Philosophy) for the amazing technicalities of its jargon and the vile barbarity of its writing. But of course he was a dear old man. In his youth a torrent of Hegelianism had passed over him and he remained always a limp victim of the drenching he had then received. He clung, this mariner shipwrecked in German waters, to the rock of the Absolute and dared not relax his grip because he saw no other prominence amid the devouring waves. And everywhere, should he slip off, were the pragmatic sharks lurking for the prey. To this rock he dragged his pupils quite irrespective of their capacity to understand the process and to cling coherently: as a result they clung only in their essays and dropped off in private thinking. Time's ironies are pleasant and Mr Cuggy made many a "prag."
Martin learned all the proper words and delighted his tutor with some cant about the higher synthesis and the disappearance of all antinomies in the absolute. In private discussion he differed. "I say. What shall we do about this philosophy?" he asked Rendell.
Even Rendell had been sickened by Cuggy. "Of course it's all drivel," he admitted. "Just systematised drivel."
"My dear ass," put in Lawrence, "has that only just struck you? I remember being rebuked for my early scoffing. The main object of these blighters is just to wrap up in a perfectly unintelligible and ungrammatical jargon what everybody else can see without bothering about it. They've got to do something to justify their screw and their measly existence, so, like the politicians, they keep up a nice series of sham fights which never end."
"The main point for us," said Martin, "or at any rate for unhappy me, is to find out how to score marks at the game. I can stand fair nonsense, but old man Hegel is a bit thick. On the other hand, pragmatism is just as silly and, what's worse, hated by the gods that be. No marks in that, I'm afraid. We've got to find a middle path."
"There's the Cambridge stuff. Russell and Moore, Business-like and quite unattractive."
"Oh, we can't be Tabs," said Lawrence.
"Well what can we be?"
"Why not bag a bit of James Ward, a bit of Bergson, a bit of Croce, and be Pampsychistic Pluralistic Realistic Modern Young Men?"
"It'll take some doing," said Martin dubiously. "It's no good being sloppy. The youths who think they'll get firsts because they know all about Beauty never get very far. What we need is Philosophy on a Business Basis. Six questions in three hours. Answers to all the problems of the universe guaranteed all correct in thirty minutes."
"Let's draw up a scheme," said Lawrence, "and diddle this damned philosophy."
So they settled down and arranged a system: they made out a plan of what they were going to think about all the possible questions. That is the best of philosophy: examiners may weave words but they have only about a dozen real questions from which to choose.
By the end of the term they had settled the business of wisdom. The schedule was complete and they had a short way of dealing with every problem from the Universality of Nature to the value of the negative and hypothetical judgment. Of course to achieve a "position" they had to sacrifice their consciences at times. It was all quite shameless and quite successful.
"After this," suggested Chard, "you might get made Railway Managers."
"Unless," said Rendell, "we get on to the staff of a certain penny weekly."
In December Martin went down once more to Devonshire. To his surprise he found Freda there. Almost two years had elapsed since he had seen her and he had almost forgotten her existence. But now he remembered vividly and was glad.
She had not altered and he rediscovered her perfect insignificance. How ridiculous it seemed that, while Margaret Berrisford with her health and strength need only work when she chose and as she chose, this wisp of a woman should have been caught up in the machinery of industry: ridiculous that one so fragile should be self-maintenant. He had little chance to talk to her that evening, but on the following afternoon he went with her to the village and along the Tavistock Road. He asked her about herself.
"They soon got rid of me," she answered. "The Trades Union people, I mean. They were naturally sick of my coming late and getting ill and being a general nuisance. Then I got in with some Suffrage Women and they gave me work. One of the new peace-and-goodwill societies. They want to link up the movement and then agitate according to Lor-an-order. They're so peaceful and orderly that, not being engaged in fighting other people like tigers, they just quarrel among themselves like cats. Oh, I do get sick of it."
"What do you do for them? Speak?"
"Oh no. Just the office work. They worked me quite hard and paid me very little, and, when I murmured, they hinted that if I was only loyal to my sex I'd do the whole show for nothing. Never work for lovers of humanity: their love has a background of dividends and West End drawing-rooms. It's none the worse for that, but they expect your love to take the form of more work for less pay. It's not good enough. I'd rather be a genuine wage-slave, thanks very much."
"City office, regular hours, and no nonsense?"
"That's it."
"Have you been ill this winter?"
"Yes. I was rotten for a bit; Margaret has been awfully good to me. When she heard of it she fished me out of my lodgings and made me come here. I was in bed a fortnight and must have been a beastly nuisance. They are splendid, all of them."
Martin agreed.
"And what about you?" she asked.
He explained his hopes and fears.
"You've no business to mope," she told him. "Don't you understand that you're an extremely lucky person? I wish I had your chances."
"I suppose I'm lucky," he said without conviction, trying to feel ashamed of his despair.
"Of course you are. Anyhow it's silly to get despondent. Besides, you're bound to do well."
"Am I? Why?"
"Because I tell you to. Do get firsts and things."
It pleased him to be ordered. He stopped in the muddy lane between two stark hedges that stood naked against the grey December sky.
"Do you care?" he asked.
"Of course I care."
"Why? I mean——" he paused awkwardly.
"Don't ask silly questions," she answered. "It's too cold to stand about."
They walked on.
"It must be pretty sickening for you," he said, "having to go on with this drudgery."
"It is rather rotten. But it can't be helped."
"Can't you get some intelligent kind of work, writing or something?"
"I'm not good enough. Don't make foolish interruptions. It's quite true. And remember I chucked up a teaching post."
"But routine must be worse for a person like you."
"It isn't nice. Really I think the most miserable people of all are those who are just too good for dull work and not good enough for real, original, creative work."
"That's painfully true," he answered. And there, gloomily, they left it.
That night Martin reflected on the events of the day. What surprised him most was the depth and intensity of his feelings about Freda. It wasn't love, it wasn't mere sympathy: was it just sentimentality? It is a habit of the younger generation in these days to turn their sexual emotions into channels of political reasoning: the result is called feminism. Instead of defending hapless women with strong right arm they are eager to defend underpaid women by strike or Act of Parliament. There is little difference, for the reason that Nature cannot be cheated. The pitchfork of modernity will not keep it out, and chivalry, loathed in name, comes bravely back in disguise. In matters of personal relation feminism is dangerous just because it is insidious. Martin had already formed his picture of Freda, overworked and underpaid, homeless and driven from pillar to post. The image was painful, but it pleased him so to suffer.
On Saturday there was to be shooting, the last of the season. People were coming down for the week-end and, doubtless, neighbours would be there. In the home coverts cock pheasants still trumpeted in peace, but their time had come.
Martin had no gun of his own, but sometimes he used a spare weapon of his uncle's. If he had been more efficient he would have liked the actual shooting: he could see the point of it and appreciate the thrill of waiting and achieving. But he had neither the long experience nor the swift eye and he was glad when the gun was needed by someone else. Freda would not see his lack of skill, for Robert had brought a friend from town for whom the gun would be required.
Neither Margaret nor Freda went out in the morning, and Martin also stayed in to work. The guns came back to lunch at half-past twelve, as they had begun to shoot early, for that made a better division of the short daylight. When they went out again Margaret accompanied Robert's friend and Martin took Freda to watch the first drive. The air was soft: otherwise Freda, being still convalescent, would not have been allowed to stand about. But it was considered warm enough for her if she wore a thick motoring coat of Margaret's. Here and there films of mist hung thinly over fields, but in the woods it was clear: the wind spoke gently in the trees or passed in silence down the rides and open glades. Underfoot rustled the drifting, many-tinted leaves and the flight of a startled song-bird made the still air reverberate. The fragrance of distant pines was mingled with the scent of the leaf-mould and sometimes the glint of the birch's silver broke the splendid monotony of giant trunks.
The mystery of Ham and Eggs flashed across Martin's mind. The cult must not exclude woods.
"Aren't these trees wonderful," he said simply.
"I think they're awful, in the proper sense of the word. They make me excited and terrified and happy."
"Awful is the right word. Why did men spoil it?"
"We've managed to spoil most things."
"Will they begin shooting soon?" asked Freda after a pause.
"The beaters will be coming up soon."
"Why do people do it? It seems so unnecessary, so savage, somehow."
"So it is savage. That's just the point. It answers a need, I suppose. You wait till you hear an old cock pheasant come crashing down. There's something very satisfactory about the noise he makes."
"It's too horrible."
"Wait and perhaps you'll find that you have a few primitive instincts left in you. You may be free of them; some people are. It isn't only the passion to kill, though. It's the passion to get over obstacles and do something immensely difficult. That's why walking-up birds is better than driving. When I've got a gun I want to hit an object which is incidentally a bird. It isn't the killing that matters."
"But why don't you shoot at targets or clay pigeons?"
"There you have me. I suppose at that point the savagery comes in. It isn't the same to shoot at disappearing targets, and that's all one can say. Hullo, they're starting, we'd better stop talking."
Far away at the back of the covert arose the noise of cracking twigs and trampled leaves: closer and closer it came until the sounds were distinguishable, now the tapping of a stick on a tree, the beating of a bush, the long-drawn cries of "Mark" and "Forward," the swift whir of wings, and at last the sharp crack of guns. The woods, once awful with still silence, were all sound and movement. The gun, behind whom Martin and Freda were standing, had only one chance and took it—a beautiful right and left. The second bird fell close to them, crashing through branches to a soft bed of leaves. Freda gasped and jumped forward. The drive was over.
"You wanted it to fall?" said Martin, taking up the warm, motionless body.
"I think I did," she confessed. "But only for a moment."
"It seemed right, didn't it?"
"I suppose so. But I couldn't touch it." She paused. "Yes, I was glad when he hit them both," she added. "The strain of waiting and looking and listening seemed to make it all different. And he was so quick. I can't think how he could have got round to the second. It was all wonderful in a horrible, alluring kind of way."
"I was right," said Martin. "There is something in it, you see."
He was glad that she understood: it gave them another point in common. The next beat would take them some way from home, out to the bleaker side of the woods. Martin proposed that they should wait until the guns returned and Freda was willing. They went to the pines where the ground was clean and firm and there on a bank they waited.
And there too Martin became more than ever aware of Freda. She was digging her toes in the soil and at the same time leaning strongly back upon the dry bank. Thus her body was strung and braced tightly so that she seemed to him to be one strong curve against the ground. And yet she was not strained uneasily and her limbs were all fine sweep and rhythm. He drank in the exquisite grace of her fragility. Everything about her was brown, her hair, her eyes, her borrowed coat, her long boots vanishing beneath brown tweed, even the feather in her adorable hat. Against the brown couch of the bank the various tints joined in a sombre harmony.
"You mustn't stare," she said suddenly. "It's rude."
"How can I help it?" he answered.
"Easily. I'm not a country girl and I'm not at all attractive in this get-up. I hate it. Great, clumsy boots!"
"You mustn't say that. You're just perfect like this. It seems so rotten that you should be dragged away from it all and made to do the world's drudgery and not see these places. You do fit into them, whatever you may say."
She turned and looked right into his eyes. "Dear boy," she said, "you mustn't take me too seriously. I'm quite happy. You mustn't worry about me."
"I can't help it," he broke out. "It's in me to feel for you, to hate the waste of you, to want you happier and stronger and getting more out of things and more out of the things you do get." He told her of his hopes and fears and how she had affected them and drawn him out of them. She had taught him not to grumble about an excellent fortune. And he began to tell her of her own perfection, but she stopped him.
"It's very, very nice of you to care about what becomes of me," she said. "I think you exaggerate my wasted capacities: in fact I know you do. But whether or not you're right about me, I know I'm right about you."
"And what about me?"
"That you aren't in love with me at all. You're rather lonely and afraid of the future and perhaps, well, sentimental. It's nothing to be ashamed of. It shows that you're generous, because you're trying to get rid of your own despair by trying to share mine, which doesn't exist as a matter of fact. You're a little in love with love and very young and very nice. And now I'm getting cold so please take me home and be quite honest with yourself."
As he walked back with her he said very little. Against his conscience he was angry, angry at what he knew was his own humiliation. She had been so damnably maternal and—worse still—so damnably right.
On Monday she went back to town; she had forbidden him to renew the subject and they had talked as they originally talked, with argument, like undergraduates. But for Martin such conversation had lost its charm and he knew such relations could not last. Still he wanted her to be a martyr dragged to the altar of commercialism and she had refused to think of martyrdom. Her happiness galled him, as he confessed to himself with shame. Yet less than ever was he able to forget her.
So Freda went. And Martin remained to work feebly and to write long letters and to sit fidgeting until the second post had come in and he knew that to-day at any rate she hadn't answered.
But sometimes she did answer, shortly indeed but kindly; and he was happy then.
In January he went back to Oxford and the further settling of philosophy on a business basis. Amid all the energies and diversions of terms the memory of Freda did not vanish nor even fade. Hitherto the postman had been neglected in Martin's survey of the passers-by, but now he was more important than any one even of the other sex. Martin had never before noticed how many posts there were in a day, but now he knew all about it.
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.
As Martin lay in bed that night it occurred to him with all the violence of a real discovery that he was, under certain conditions, the destined ruler and administrator of a nation far vaster and more ancient than his own, a nation of whose religion, ideals and practical needs he knew nothing whatever. He was equally ignorant of its population, products and methods of life, though of course he had a year in which to learn about these things. Incredible that he, Martin, twenty-two, boyish and superficial, should be a guardian of this people, a pro-consul in the making! And perhaps more strange was his apathy. In addition to his complete ignorance about India he cared nothing for the place, for how can a man, temperamentally inclined to Nationalism rather than to Imperialism, care for a nation which he only knows by a red blob on the map or by finding its stamps in collections restricted to the British Empire. India meant nothing to Martin. He had read Kipling, and certainly no tales of his had, despite the magic of their narrative, made him responsive to the call of the East. He still took it for granted that British rulers there would be as British rulers elsewhere, bigoted, snobbish, and unexpectedly effectual: corrupt, perhaps, fooling the poor and honouring the rich, bungling and lying and making money. That, he felt, was the attitude of the men he met, exaggerated, no doubt, but based on fact. But as he lay gazing at the cracks in the old ceiling above him his thoughts went back to the sheer bulk and beauty of The Gable, to Holywell at dusk, to the woods around The Steading and the cult of his uncle's deity. About the Oriental world he neither knew nor cared. He couldn't believe in it, so remote and unimportant it still seemed.
At Oxford during his Indian year he found that the future civilians took little interest in the place to which they were going. They wanted the pay and perhaps, though not admittedly, the possibility of a knighthood and a row of letters after their names. Certainly no one was concerned about the White Man's Burden. Naturally he did not blame these people: like himself, they were only seeking for a reasonable livelihood. But he was sickened by the cant he discovered in speeches and papers, the froth about self-sacrifice and noble callings: the work might, he acknowledged, be good and useful, it might promote the welfare of mankind and bring the peace of Cæsar to a troubled world, but no one was giving anything away in going to do it.
And he was lonely now. He had rooms in narrow Ship Street, and there he spent solitary days and nights craving the society of the Push: sometimes one of them would come down for a week-end, but otherwise there was scarcely anyone to whom he could talk. The winter crept on dismally, and Martin studied Bengali or rode on horseback over Shotover and Port meadow. But there was something wrong about Oxford: he felt old and alien and the college, when he entered it, seemed to be bubbling over with freshmen, all amazingly young and innocent and happy. He was vaguely jealous of them, uncharitably hostile. Were they not talking as he had talked, idling as he had idled? One friend he had, a poet in his third year, discreet and practical. From time to time Martin dined with him and forgot about India.
Most of all Freda mattered. Now that he was alone and despondent, he relied on her letters and his memories and thoughts of her to make life easier, even more tolerable. He retraced the whole course of their friendship, trying to reshape their relations. He remembered her first as an arguer, a friend to whom he had talked and talked: and then as a martyr, the sufferer for whom he had felt with a genuine, unstinting pity. And at last ... well, at last as a woman, as a person who had the power of making life different, of turning London into an enchanted fairyland and India into a vision of cool beauty, a person of infinite tenderness and understanding, a person whose presence and sympathy could stop things hurting. What rendered him most happy was his ability to meet her on equal terms. Hitherto she had been self-supporting, he a pampered undergraduate. He had had prospects but no certainty, and he had shrunk, even on that summer night upon the river, from saying things that he wanted to say, because he felt that it wasn't fair. One couldn't honourably say these things until one was 'a made man': one couldn't decently make women expect things unless you had some reasonable basis for hopes. With girls like May Williams it didn't matter what one said, because he had been just a 'fellow,' she just a 'girl.' Such affairs had their agreeable conventions. But with Freda it had been different, because there was no such tacit agreement: she might, she would expect him to take her out of her toil and weariness. And now he was free to say and do as it pleased him. He was 'made' and had position, for only by great folly and stupidity could he lose his opportunity.
At the end of term he went up to London. He told the Berrisfords that he had to go to a riding test at Woolwich and wanted to see the varsity rugger match. It is odd that a young man should be instinctively ashamed of love: he will tell his companions of his bodily desires gladly and even proudly, but he will hesitate before he confesses a craving for sympathy. He did ride, it is true, and he went to Queen's Club, where he caught an occasional glimpse of Cambridge three-quarters running abominably fast. It was one of the 'slump' years in Oxford football, the reaction after the reign of the immortals at Iffley Road, when the whole city and university trooped down to watch six elusive Internationals playing with the opposition's defence. Now Cambridge was doing the same and avenging those past defeats. Humiliating to watch those Tabs waving hats and yelling and ultimately carrying their captain from the field of glory! Comforting to reflect that when Oxford won they won soberly and with restraint, as though victory were for them the normal and accustomed thing! Only Tabs would behave like that. With such thoughts he tried to soothe his anger and disgust.
In the evening, because Freda had a headache, Martin dined with Lawrence and became expensively drunk: later he had memories of a crowded music hall, of distant singers and dancers flitting incessantly before white scenery: they worried him and he shouted at them to go away, but seemingly they refused. There were recollections of drinks with an old Elfreyan and the toasting of the school, of an elaborate conversation in French with a woman who only spoke Cockney, of a speech to the Indian nation begun on the crowded promenade and ended magnificently from the fountain at Piccadilly Circus. Probably there was supper somewhere and more noise and then he must have walked miles, for suddenly he became sober and found himself far down the Fulham Road. He picked up a taxi, and managed to get into bed more or less successfully about half-past three.
Freda, too, had spent a dull autumn. She had spoken the truth when she said that she was just too good for dull toil and not good enough for real work. The system was gradually devouring her and she had long ago reached the stage at which the one thing in life that matters is six o'clock, the hour of release from the drudgery and sordid gloom of the office. She lived for her leisure and on her leisure she had nothing to spend. There were friends whom she saw at intervals, but their intimacy had limitations and was only close enough to drive home the need for real companionship.
In one matter she had been fortunate. She had found a cheap room at the top of an old house in Bloomsbury and was thus spared the necessity of going to one of those gloomy mansions for working women. It was a small room, high up and chilly: but it was hers, and even the gas-fire could not rob it of real comfort.
Martin had not meant to linger in London as he had work to do. But he soon realised the impossibility of going away. Not only did he need Freda, but she too needed him. There was no advantage in denying the mutual emptiness and mutual satisfaction. So he stayed, and in the mornings and afternoons he read his Indian law and history, or wandered about London, loitering in picture galleries or threading the ways of Bloomsbury with many a passing glance at the house where Freda slept. Squarely and simply it stood, with no flaunting brick-work or Victorian embellishment: its colour was the nameless colour that a London house should have, the sombre blending of grey and red and deepest brown. On one side was a mean street, one of those sad thoroughfares which Chance has brought to destitution: the houses were good and strong, but each contained a score of people and belched out numberless squalid children to play and quarrel in the teeming gutters. On the other side a wide street ran straight up to a square garden and the two lines of houses converged and faded away in a haze of smoke and branches. In the afternoons, when Martin walked there, sunset would stain the gentle greyness with pink or, in angrier mood, would stab dark clouds and leave great rifts of red. It was all so strong and quiet and dignified, seeming actually to exhale the finest quality of London. The street, at any rate, was worthy of her.
When the long day's wait was over he would have Freda to himself. Then London became beautiful in every line and form and colour. The lamps were flaming jewels and the rain-soaked, glittering streets were bands of silver: the murkiest lane threw off its squalor, and the night, with its great glooms and shadows, its sudden bursts of iridescence and its mystery of swiftly moving figures, made him think of Eastern jungles, splashed with fierce colours, cavernous with infinite shade. Then a woman, rouged and powdered and swathed in tawny fur, would sweep majestically past: she was the tiger who burned brightly. Formerly he hated these women, because they charmed him, challenged and held his gaze, hated them too because they brought home to him the fact that he had not the courage of his desires. But now he need not care. That was the great joy of it.
So in this enchanted forest of London they walked and drove, feasted and saw the play: not one play, but all the plays. And after the play they feasted again and were contented. It was a forest that tended to swallow gold rather than yield it, and Martin had to borrow on the security of his position as a probationer in the Indian Civil Service. But there was pleasure in the signing of the bond.
Sometimes they would sit in Martin's hotel, which had a large, deserted lounge with sensible corners and crannies for conversation. Sometimes he would go back with Freda to her room in Bloomsbury and wait until she turned him out.
"I won't have you here after eleven," she told him and quoted from The Great Adventure on reputations, the coddling and neglect of them.
"But if you have me at all——" he protested.
"I'm English and I believe in compromise," she answered.
So he stayed till eleven. It was a neat place and orderly with naked walls: he loved it as he loved its owner. When the washstand and bed had been hidden behind their curtain, the stray shoes kicked beneath the wardrobe, and the arm-chair drawn up to the gas-fire, there seemed to be nothing mean or sordid in the room despite the lack of space and the roof corner that jutted rudely in. What did it matter now if the window looked on to a back yard and a world of chimneys?
"Why are you so wonderfully tidy?" Martin asked.
"Don't you associate tidiness with me?"
"No, you're too wild. Tidinesss is a petty virtue."
"Well I confess it hasn't anything to do with my general character. I hope I'm not petty anyhow. It's sternly practical tidiness. I used to be lazy and find my stockings muddled up with the spoons, but it soon sickened me and now I have come to prefer the fag of clearing up to the discomfort of a muddle. Besides, if I'm going to have you here it oughtn't to be a beddy 'bed-sit,' but a sitty 'bed-sit.'"
"Your precious reputation," he laughed.
On another night she asked him what the Berrisfords thought about his absence from home.
"I don't know and I don't think I care!" he answered.
"Why? They must be interested in you, and you're very fond of them."
"I dare say, but I can't think of them now." He drew her to him. "Freda, I'm too happy to care about them. I just can't imagine that the world has any other place but London, or any other people but you and me. Nothing else is real; nothing counts, not India or Oxford or anything."
She yielded herself to him, but suddenly drew back.
"You mustn't go and muddle things," she said conscientiously. "Supposing you fail next September, what would I feel like?"
"I won't fail next September," he answered defiantly.
"I'm glad you said that. You must be confident, much, much more confident. I'm sure you would have been happier if you had never been afraid of things."
Ecstasy to know her gladness, to see her quick smile of confidence because he was confident! How could he have feared and doubted? He could not let her draw away: his arms must have her.
"I'm never going to be afraid again," he said. "I know what was wrong now."
"Well?"
"I didn't care about anything. I didn't know what I wanted, while everything lay in front of me. I didn't feel, though I had all the world to feel about. I didn't love, though I had all the world to love. I just drifted. Now I have what I want."
She was silent. Across the tumult of his soul stole things of the senses, the pulsing of her blood, the scent of that brown witchery of hair, the touch of her tired hand, the vision of a glistening bow of silk on a poised foot: above all, the divine sense of his own grasping possession, her clinging weakness.
"I know now what I want," he went on rapidly. "I want the same thing to go on that has just begun, the thing that has brushed all the hardness and ugliness out of the world and made the future easy. You've done all that. I want you."
He crushed her to him roughly, almost hurting her: and he knew by her stillness that it pleased her so to be hurt.
"You're not going back now," he whispered fiercely. "You're not going to knock to pieces the thing you've built. India is a cool heaven now; don't make it a fiery hell. Work is all doing and creating. Don't make it all drudgery. Oh, I'm selfish. You're so perfect, and I can only talk of my own work, my own troubles. Freda, I'm sorry. I——"
Still she was silent.
"Oh, say something," he begged. "Forgive me for being selfish."
"There's nothing to forgive."
"Then say—you've said you cared for me—say you love me."
In a moment he had forgotten his remorse and again was claiming, insisting. And she, knowing that love can be, even must be, selfish and imperious, was glad that he should claim her and obeyed his command.
Of course Martin stayed in London over Christmas and into the New Year, living with a fullness he had never known, seeing the purpose and fineness of things which he had despised and neglected. How strange it was that all the world should be changed by that one weak figure, seemingly so ineffectual! how strange that one mortal should carry for another the keys of heaven! How trivial seemed all his philosophy with its objectivity of this and that when he discovered how subjective all his outlook was, how the presence or the absence of a loved one could make or mar the colour-medley of a sunset or the beauty of a tree against the sky.
One thing was certain: he gloried in possession. All his loneliness was forgotten now and, as he paced the streets, he could look upon the other couples without the pang of jealousy that once had stung him. There would be no more glances thrown furtively at passing women, no turning of an eager eye for bygone faces, no more emptiness and yearning. Deep magic lay in the thought that Freda, with her smile, and her quick mind, and her infinite grace of movement, was his to possess, to own. He was not ashamed to glory in these proprietary relations nor was she ashamed to accept them. She even welcomed them, yielding to Martin with an utter abandonment of self. She wanted only to be his, to be his loved possession, to help him and to share humbly in his triumphs and successes.
One night indeed he repented, not of his love, but of his manner of love. He felt the indignity of ownership.
They had gone, in a fit of intellectual enthusiasm, to see a play called Drift. At a small outlying theatre two young men of ideas were completing the noble task of self-imposed bankruptcy by giving the British public a season of "good drama." And the public naturally helped on the work by the easy method of staying away. The house was barely half full when, after the hammerings customary in these circles, the curtain went up.
Drift, a play in four acts by Villiers Wentworth, turned out to be a fair specimen of that now antiquated genre, The New Drama. It had the monosyllabic title, the insistent realism, the contempt for form and dramatic convention, the arid conversation with lapses of brilliance, the admirable acting, and, above all, the Great Gloom. It was naturally a play with a point, showing, justly and forcibly, the hopeless inadequacy of modern life to provide the average man and woman with anything like a Unity of Interest. The characters drifted from home which they dreaded to work which they loathed and in the evening they made the return journey. Nothing held their lives together, nothing remained as a permanent, unifying interest. There was love, but, as Mr Villiers Wentworth pointed out, the young man is barred socially and economically from indulging in anything but hole-and-corner affairs just when he most needs real sympathy.
"Not a good play," said Martin as they walked out into the flaring streets and joined the joyous welter of confusion at Piccadilly. "The man's got no sense of humour and he thinks that everyone is miserable who hasn't got two hundred a year. The poor are just as happy as the rich. Of course they oughtn't to be, but they are."
"But there was a point," said Freda, "about unity of interest. It may be obvious, but it's true. Didn't you drift? Haven't I drifted?"
They turned into a restaurant.
As they supped they forgot about the play. But later Martin's mind returned to the subject.
"Come back," said Freda suddenly. "Penny."
"Hand over," he answered, smiling as he started.
"Well, what is it?"
"You, of course."
"I'm sorry for that. You looked so sad."
"I'm feeling ashamed," he confessed.
"What of?"
"Of the way I've thought of you. I've been so selfish. I only cared for my own escape from drifting. It's been my work, my life, my love. I have been thinking of you as the person who would make my life perfect. It's been all me, me, me. When we first met I thought of you and your work. Now it's only me and my work."
"That's as it should be."
"No, no, it isn't. A year ago I should have hated myself for thinking like this."
"Perhaps you have learned as well as lived."
"I've been a brute and there's an end of it." He was deriving a secret pleasure from his self-depreciation. There was bliss in humiliating himself before her, in grovelling at the feet of her whom he adored. If he could not get the conventional thrill from the confession of past affairs and failings, he would achieve the ecstasy of self-torture by laying bare a loftier mistake.
But she laughed at him. "Silly Billy," she said. "Pay the waiter and I'll tell you."
She told him as they drove back together in their taxi.
"After all," she began, "compare my work with yours. Mine is drudgery. Yours is big and important. It doesn't matter what becomes of mine, but it matters a lot what becomes of yours, I hate mine and I love yours. I want to give myself up to yours, to make it easier and better. Can't you see, Martin dear, that isn't selfishness or unselfishness. Those words don't count in such a case. If we love, then I'm you and you're me, and one person can't give to himself or take away from himself surely."
"It sounds so specious," he said. "And yet I still feel greedy, as though I were denying your right to be yourself."
"I don't want to be myself. I want to be different. I'm as greedy as you are and more so, only differently. As it is, the word isn't real. We're both giving and both taking and there's an end of it."
He was silent for a moment. "It's no use my trying to say how perfect you are," he said at last.
"Dear, delightful, serious, conscience-stricken gloomkins," she laughed at him. "What does all this matter ... how we share things, I mean? The only real thing is enthusiasm, wanting and feeling and loving. You were at a loose end until you began to feel; you couldn't work, you couldn't do anything. Nor could I. And now work is all changed and seems better and easier. The office is a palace for me, India a pleasure garden for you. Do stop worrying and be sensible."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try and be good. You're always right. This taxi goes far too fast. We're in your street."
"Bother," she said.
"Let's tell him to drive on somewhere else and come back in another one."
"No. You've spent far too much and we've done that often enough. I'm going to be a good girl to-night."
"Tyrant."
"Wastrel."
"He's stopping. One more kiss."
Through streets that more than ever resembled enchanted pathways in a forest of shadow and silver, Martin went back exulting to his hotel.