Mark had left his luggage at the station, so that he could walk up through the late dusk, watching the bats cut their velvet bodies into the darkening gold.
The boys weren’t about, and wouldn’t be till late tomorrow, but as he walked through the hot noisy street, he seemed to see them hurrying along hatless, in their antediluvian jackets, absorbed and thrilled in their share of the steady human stream all moving in the same direction – and yet with how many utterly different goals.
He couldn’t help comparing the boys, and what the Head was trying to make of them, with what Hitler had made of the Hitler youth leaders.
Hitler airily stated that an English public school was the best training-ground for Nazi doctrines. Certainly the Herrenvolk delusion was at the basis of both, though to Mark himself it was more than a delusion. But the direction – the training – hadn’t, he told himself, the fantastic Nazi aim. The Nazis wanted a boy that would toe their line – the College wanted a boy that would toe his own. Yet was not the College too special, too privileged to be quite sane? He had only begun to ask himself these questions so it was a relief, when suddenly the rose-red wall of the College, 50like a small wave shouldering itself gently forward, filled in the opening space.
The College was not as large as Mark remembered it; but it was even more beautiful. Pushed to one side of the crowded town on the outskirts of the Castle grounds, almost part of the great park itself, the school was modest about its own significance. You could not, Mark thought, get a real impression of it from any one spot. It was like everything else in England of any special importance – only half visible – not as it would have been in any other great country, purposely presented.
The masters’ houses were mostly Georgian or Queen Anne. They were all much larger than they looked; but they weren’t there to attract attention, because they knew they would get all the attention they needed without taking any trouble over it. They hung about like attendants at Court who may be called upon at any moment to fulfil important duties – duties with which they are perfectly familiar, and therefore need feel no anxiety when the call comes.
The sense of the Court, of the Castle, of what went on behind the solid yellow walls was always rather overpowering. Not, as Mark reminded himself, that the school really had anything to do with Windsor Castle. Yet for hundreds of years there had been that sense of a special tie, of being nearer to the Crown – more its special training ground and adherent than any other of the Island schools.
You said the word ‘Eton’ and instantly, Mark thought, the Castle walls were there, the Park, the silver gleam, the Castle itself, moving silently into the mind with the stateliness of a swan rounding the curve of a river.
You could turn your back on them – as many boys did – oblivious, contemptuous, self-absorbed; but long years afterwards – all over the world in the strangest places, if 51someone said that word again, up the picture sprang and there was an emotion at the bottom of the heart to match it – so that for ever and wherever you were, you felt fundamentally linked to that unspoken symbol.
You might even hate the Castle, Mark told himself, and all that it stood for – but you could not forget it.
Nor could you believe that the effect of the College itself was always that of snobbery. Perhaps half of the boys went to Eton because their parents wanted them to be grand – and the other half because it was a family tradition to go there if you could. The boys that wanted to be grand – if they were like their parents, and it had to be remembered that boys very often weren’t – did pick up all Eton’s strange faults and absurdities; its isolationism; its defensive arrogance; its inconsiderate insolence; and its deep unconscious selfishness.
These boys would leave with harder hearts, more individual senses, less moral and social honesty than had they belonged to any other school; but the other half took what the school had to give them in a different way. It was for them, Mark told himself, that he and the other masters toiled so eagerly – for in the end, partly as the fruit of their toil – these boys would gain more than they could have gained from any other school in the world.
Mark couldn’t say quite how they would have gained it. Certainly from no particular master – not even from the very best Head – it was a spirit in the school itself that seemed to reach a special kind of boy.
You knew almost at once if you were a good master – and Mark was a good master, and had studied with sensitiveness and understanding the stuff of youth – exactly which of the hurrying flock beneath his observant eyes was going to turn into that special brand – strong, gentle, modest, 52reliable, with that adjustable dignity that seemed to come from something unbreakable and indomitable that was at the very core of the heart.
Mark knew that out of the thirty boys who were coming back to his House, this term, there were perhaps a dozen who would form this fine, indelible pattern.
They would form it spontaneously and of their own accord, out of what they found under their hand. Mark had swiftly, once in a blue moon – not oftener – to nudge them spiritually. Sometimes a look would do it; sometimes a half-dropped word opened the door into the Mystic Silence, but they went in by themselves, and at their own volition came out – Etonians. After this secret initiation, Mark thought, they seemed to know effortlessly how to behave to everybody, and how to meet without apparent flurry, all the emergencies of life.
No doubt many of these self-elected boys had good parents and so already had something to go on. They wanted to find out the secret. But sometimes – quite mysteriously – they had bad parents, and didn’t know there was a secret, yet they found it. They became clear-eyed, competent and absolutely trustworthy. But where did this spirit come from? There were rules but as few as possible, and certainly no more effective than any other school rules. Mark himself drew the attention of each new boy once – and seldom more than once – to what was expected of him; but he used the fewest possible words, and made the fewest possible suggestions. They were to go to their Dame about their clothes and their health. Older boys told them most that they needed to know. They were squires waiting on knights who would, in the fullness of time, accept them into their glorious company. They were not free – but freedom was one day to be theirs. Some of them hated being fags of 53course; but remarkably few really; and then, seldom for the best of reasons. At the end of their training all of them knew how to behave superficially well – and some of them how to behave superlatively well – and did so – for the rest of their lives. Yet why they did so remained a secret. The Head’s way of dealing with the boys was simply to take them and their behaviour completely for granted. He seldom asked questions, though he was always prepared, at the proper time and place, to answer them. If there was any trouble, he generally knew what it was without asking. He always waited to be told what either masters or boys wanted to impart. Personal questions, personal behaviour were what – unless he was obliged to take them up – he ignored. He was anonymous to the core. The gimlet eyes of a thousand boys observed nothing pretentious about him. Half of his dignity (he had no ‘side’, but his quietness was a sort of dignity) they could use for themselves. Many of them used it, and became in their turn dignified. But not until they had guessed what the Head’s dignity really sprang from – an ability to meet adequately whatever turned up. Not to make a fuss! Wasn’t that, Mark asked himself almost savagely – for he felt somehow or other vaguely threatened – enough? Enough to hold England – enough to hold an empire safe? Or should there be a little more of something else – that he hadn’t got? For Mark himself was rather like the Head – he was not pretentious; he was very quiet; he could tackle every difficulty he had yet met, except one – that of falling in love – adequately.
He hadn’t been adequate to the love that had nearly swept him off his feet, and for fear of being swept quite off, he’d run away from it. Morally, he told himself, as he reached his own garden gate, he had even felt justified; for a man should not make love to his cousin’s wife. 54
It was a pleasant inconspicuous house behind good red walls, standing in the middle of a smooth green lawn. There was nothing shadowy about it, even in the dusk, and yet it suddenly seemed to Mark as unsubstantial as a dream. Something had happened to Mark during his European holiday – the foundations of life itself had been shaken.
Miss Totness, however, wasn’t shaken. Miss Totness was his Dame. She stood in the hall, smiling and calm, with her kind, plain face set in sober greeting. ‘Your train was a little late,’ she told him, ‘but not later than I had expected.’
Slowly the house came back to Mark in all its secure, common-sense beauty. He had forgotten how airy and light it was, how pleasantly austere, and how little cumbered up by anything that wasn’t useful.
There was very little furniture in any of the rooms – almost no softness, yet it was comfortable enough; and dazzlingly clean.
Miss Totness, when she found Mark was alone – as yet none of the other masters had turned up, they all would of course to-morrow with the boys, and everything was ready for them – sat by Mark’s side and waited on him herself, while he ate his dinner. Matchett had given him clear soup, a sole, and a fruit salad; she had cooked them as well as if they had been cooked in France. Miss Totness told him, in her usual composed and sensible way, news of the school, and the staff. It was all very soothing and companionable; and the kind of news a man likes to hear when he has been away for several months in a strange land. Sometimes Miss Totness had to bring him problems, but never in a way that made them sound insoluble. They were simply things that it was Mark’s place to put right. Any problem that wasn’t his place to put right never came before him. But to-night apparently there were no problems at all. Miss Totness had 55been a Dame for twenty years and she was incapable of not understanding practically everything that came her way. As to the boys themselves, she might have invented them, she knew them so intimately, so unerringly, with such a kindly humour for their frailties, and with so much wise unconcern for their dramas. She made no distinctions. She had no pets, except perhaps Mark himself. A housemaster, she considered, needed special attention. The responsibility of the whole house after all rested upon him; and he had to be understood and kept calm. Miss Totness understood Mark; and kept him calm. She saw this evening that he was not calm. It might be because of the new term beginning to-morrow; but probably not because of it. Mark liked his profession and she had never seen him upset at a new term before. Upset at the end, if things hadn’t gone well, of course – they all were, but not at the start.
The Head, she told him, had been back several days; it was quite possible that he might be free to see Mark for a short while, before going to bed.
Probably everything was already in hand, but Mark might like to ring up after dinner and find out – or perhaps he would like to have what was left of the evening quietly to himself?
Miss Dale, his secretary, had been in this morning. She had come over on her bicycle and sorted out all his letters. There was nothing, she had said, that wouldn’t keep till to-morrow. Almost all parents’ letters. One knew what they were before a term began. Especially the new ones – thinking they had to explain each new boy separately – as if boys didn’t explain themselves, almost the moment you first set eyes on them. Young Talbot had whooping cough – he ought to have had it earlier, so he wouldn’t be coming back till half-term, if then. There was a new Hindu prince. 56Special care would have to be taken of him, of course, just to begin with – probably that nice young Desmond might keep an eye on him; and then there was his food. Miss Totness would see about his food. She knew all about Hindu food – it was quite simple really. As long as he wasn’t teased. Young Hindus – and this was a very young one, not much over twelve but highly intelligent of course – were rather touchy; and felt the cold a good deal too!
Mr. Halstead had telegraphed he might be late – his mother was dying; and if she actually did die, he would have to ask for an extension because of the funeral. He had let the Head know already, so there was nothing to be done about it. It was very sad – just at the beginning of a new term too – and attached to his mother as most young men were, whether they were good mothers or not. ‘Oh, I think most of them are,’ Mark murmured politely.
‘Too good most of them,’ Miss Totness cryptically remarked. ‘That’s just the trouble! They think that’s all that’s necessary. They should know how to make their boys good too, and boys can’t be good if their mothers do the whole thing for them!’
‘Still, that’s better than those flibberty-gibbets,’ Mark reminded her, ‘who never look after their sons at all!’ Yes, Miss Totness agreed, anything was better than a flibberty-gibbet. Did Mark really think there was going to be a war?
Mark tipped the cream jug thoughtfully over the cool, firm fruit. How much better, he thought, his own food tasted than anybody else’s. It was a pity that he had missed both his asparagus and his strawberries.
‘Yes,’ he said, meeting her eyes for one swift, curiously honest second. ‘There will be war I think, Miss Totness, probably quite soon. It doesn’t do to talk about it of course.’
‘Ah,’ Miss Totness thought to herself, ‘so that’s what 57it is – poor young man – it’s the boys he’s thinking of!’ She was knitting a small boy’s pullover as she talked, and she clicked on without a pause. ‘It’s very unsuitable,’ she remarked finally with quiet disapproval. ‘I can’t think why we didn’t keep those Germans down, when we could of course! Naturally I don’t wish to criticize dear Mr. Chamberlain, but it hardly seems to have been worth while – at his age – going all that way to Munich, does it?’
Mark agreed without comment, that it didn’t. Miss Totness put down her knitting and made Mark a cup of perfectly clear, hot and tasteless black coffee from a machine on a tray, the sort that looks nice while you are making it, on a drawing-room table.
Then Mark rang up the Head. The Head himself answered the telephone, and said, ‘Yes – do come over for half an hour or so before going to bed.’ So Mark went out again, into the misty darkness. The air was a little sticky and a little chilly at the same time, with river fog, yet it was sweet. The sky was ribboned over with searchlights. They stabbed stealthily into the soft mass of the dark; little pools of opalescent light followed their wake. Neither the moon nor any stars were visible.
The Head’s house was close by, and except for the fact that the rooms were larger, it looked very much the same as Mark’s. Both men knew Europe; both climbed mountains; both spoke foreign languages extremely well; and both were inalienably British. They simply couldn’t help being what they were; and they would rather have died than help it. That was the trouble, Mark told himself, as he found the familiar gatepost almost by the sense of touch, and took his familiar way up to the Head’s front door – why should any of them have to die – in order to help it? Sheepdogs seldom think much about their own danger, when they 58smell wolves close to the fold – and it was not of his own dangerous plan that Mark thought, only of his boys.
The Head too, he well knew, had the same gnawing constant dread, at the pit of his stomach. ‘It’s such a little place to keep, really,’ Mark thought rather wistfully, as he waited for the door to open. ‘This Island is just a sort of front doorstep to Europe – yet if it were to go – well then, damned well everything else goes with it!’
The Head was ten years older than Mark, but he was too fit physically to have ceased to look rather a young man still. They both assured each other that they had enjoyed their holidays. The Head had been climbing in Wales, Mark in North Tirol. They described their climbs; and their weather. ‘One more summer in Tirol,’ Mark said with an emphasis he made as light as possible. ‘You mean you don’t think,’ the Head said, pausing over filling his pipe, and looking up at Mark with his faintly raised eyebrows, which he always expected to put at least half his question for him. ‘Well, perhaps not,’ Mark admitted slowly. ‘Perhaps not another summer!’ He didn’t want actually to say that Europe would not have another free and happy summer during their lifetimes, but sooner or later that was what he had come over to say. B. had said Mark could go back to Eton till Christmas – then he wanted him for six months’ training – on odd business, very intensive – shipyards, airplane factories, how to blow up railway lines, how to run a printing press – otherwise Mark wouldn’t be much use. He wasn’t to tell anybody anything – except the Head. B. had said he could tell the Head anything he liked; for B. knew the Head – he had been one of his boys. The Head took it exactly as Mark had hoped he would, with a mere nod of calm acceptance. It was a pity. He had hoped to keep Mark, he thought that Mark was the sort of schoolmaster 59that was wanted. ‘We may have to change a good deal,’ he said consideringly, ‘I don’t quite know how – but we may have to – and I should have liked to have kept you specially because I know you can change. Some people can’t. But that of course will make you specially valuable to them as well. It will be very important to have the right kind of masters here for the next few years. The boys are bound to be badly shaken. I think they have begun to feel it already. They’re getting rather confused – and without knowing quite why – discouraged. War is in the air – all these crises! War means their sudden and probable death. They oughtn’t to have to think about death so much, at their age. What we’ve got them here for is to think about life! The preparations all wrong too – and the work doesn’t seem worth while. And yet I suppose it needn’t be any different in its deepest sense – if we can get them to understand it. “The readiness is all.”’ ‘Even Hamlet didn’t understand that till just before he went into the banqueting hall,’ Mark reminded him, ‘and he said to Horatio even then, “Thou canst not think how ill all feels about my heart!”’ ‘Yes, but only to Horatio,’ the Head murmured, ‘and then he went in.’ ‘Yes, I know,’ Mark agreed without looking at the Head. ‘I was wondering as I came up from the station – you can’t help wondering somehow – you say we shall have to change – so I suppose you’ve been wondering too – whether we are on the right lines here or not? We do teach them service I know – we do teach them the values we think they ought to have – but are they the real values? Are there any special values belonging to one class rather than another? Of course we may say what we like about Democracy – but we are out to make men here who can rule an Empire – they always have. They’re not the only rulers of course, but they’re most of them the sort of people rulers get chosen from!’ 60
‘I don’t see why they shouldn’t be,’ the Head said between puffs of his pipe, leaning back in a chair that wasn’t particularly comfortable, but it was the kind he liked in the evenings, ‘somebody has got to rule an empire. We have got one – and it takes ruling. But I admit there may have to be new ways of ruling. We may have to change what we teach – and even the spirit of our teaching. We may have to open up the school – and have a different kind of boy let in on us. We must be on the look-out for the right kind of stuff, and not suppose that it’s all confined to any one class. It’s just this melting-pot feeling in the air that makes me want younger men on the staff, but if there is war, I shall have to lose ’em – as I am losing you. Do what you can before you go.’
‘Do what?’ Mark asked abruptly, with almost too much earnestness.
The Head shifted his eyes a little, to the open window and the wandering searchlights. He had lit nothing but a small reading-lamp, when Mark came in, so that they could still watch the pierced uneasy sky.
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I expect you know what I mean! You’ll be preparing yourself – that’ll help to prepare them.’
‘The people I’ve got to mix with are awfully odd,’ Mark said after a pause, ‘a Jesuit priest – that artist Pirschl – we saw his show in Paris together last spring – an awfully rum emotional sort of fellow – and a woman – a sort of psychiatrist doctor. I don’t like her – but I think she’s honest. I’ve got to see a lot of her, that’s the worst of it. I don’t like women.’
‘My wife,’ the Head observed quietly, ‘I find is just another human being – most of the time she’s only that – but of course she’s a woman too, and that I think rather improves her status as a human being. You liked your mother, didn’t you? I remember her. I know you like Miss 61Totness. Isn’t it perhaps not women you dislike so much, as being attracted by them? You think you have to let something go when you’re attracted. Well – I suppose that’s true. Something has to go – but something comes that rather more than takes its place.’
‘Well, I never have liked coming and going,’ Mark admitted, ‘I like to stay put; and I’m exactly happy where and how I am.’
The Head sighed. He made no comment upon that particular happiness, or indeed upon any other. He felt to-night, an extremely unhappy man; and vulnerable in a thousand different ways. Each way the life of a boy; but he did not say so to Mark, because he saw in his eyes exactly the same kind of unhappiness; and he knew that neither of them could alter it, until the war which had not yet begun – was over.