Friends and Lovers (29 page)

“Mr. Pomfrey, you know this woman is on the University black-list.” And Pomfrey said gently, “Yes, we know. Mother and I are frightfully upset about it.”

They all laughed except Marain. He, of course, had known the story already.

George had become aware of that halfway through the telling.

He rose suddenly, placing his unfinished glass of beer on the mantelpiece.

“Goodbye, David. What about dinner some time next week?

Good. We’ll arrange that.”

George gave an easy smile all round, and as he closed the door firmly behind him he took a deep breath of relief. David was a very decent chap, even if his politics were impossible, but why did he have such peculiar friends?

Burns was all right. Except that he went about too much with Marain. He had certainly got in with the wrong crowd if he really wanted to understand England. Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer?

“We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince every one, including ourselves, that we don’t even notice the audience.” George frowned for a moment, and then he laughed to himself.

That was just David being David. Odd fellow, David, and yet likable. But he wasn’t normal: falling heavily in love, wanting to get married, giving up all idea of the Foreign Office. Definitely not normal.

George swung his long leg over his bicycle—his driving “After all, what?” David asked bluntly. There was a particularly keen look in his eye which was disconcerting.

“Oh, nothing … Even if I did think you were taking everything a little too seriously it wouldn’t have the least effect on you, would it?”

“You are bloody well right,” David said cheerfully.

Well, at least when I do meet her again I’ll have enough sense not to ask her out to dinner.”

“You are bloody well right there too,” David said vehemently.

George hid his surprise, but it remained with him after they had begun to talk about other things, about the recent crop of plays at the Repertory Theatre, about the newest Marx Brothers’ film showing at the Super, about the latest story concerning the Proctor and his bulldogs. It was a story about Pomfrey downstairs. George insisted on telling it, and David, who had heard it two days ago, kept a tactful silence. In any case, every one was going to hear it being told (and told not so well as one could tell it oneself) for the next week or so.

George had just reached the climax, when two visitors arrived: Burns, American, tall, and smiling, with a loose tweed suit and fair hair cut so very short that to the unaccustomed British eye he seemed to be permanently astounded; Marain, thin and dark, with a gentle voice and savage phrases.

Marain switched on the light.

“Or do you prefer to be romantic?” he asked.

George halted in embarrassment. He liked Burns, decent chap, played a good game of lacrosse, even if it was the sort of thing that girls played at school. But Marain was another cup of tea. Too bitter a brew for George.

He couldn’t swallow Marain. Strange taste in friends David had. That was the trouble with David. You never knew whom you might meet in his rooms. No doubt Burns and Marain had come to talk politics: Marain talked of little else.

“Do go on,” Marain was saying, with that smile of his that George never could stand.

George eyed the mocking face. Marain always gave him a feeling of being challenged. He had lost interest in telling the story, but he was determined to finish it now. He cleared his throat.

“Pomfrey,” he began, and then wished he had not accepted the challenge.

He cursed himself for the nervousness which paralysed him for a moment.

“Pomfrey,” he went on evenly, ‘was strolling down the High last Saturday with one of his blondes from Reading.” (His voice, his face, his comfortably sprawling body seemed extremely controlled and confident, so that Burns, watching this specimen of young animal, thought of him as the typical example of unjustified English superiority which irritated all foreigners to the point of pushing them into print about it.) ” A silly thing to do, really, because she is well known. He was stopped, of course, by one of the bulldogs with upraised bowler. The Proctor came up and said, “Mr. Pomfrey, would you introduce your companion to me?” Pomfrey said, “This is my sister.” The Prog recovered his breath.

“Mr. Pomfrey, you know this woman is on the University black-list.” And Pomfrey said gently, “Yes, we know. Mother and I are frightfully upset about it.”

They all laughed except Marain. He, of course, had known the story already.

George had become aware of that halfway through the telling.

He rose suddenly, placing his unfinished glass of beer on the mantelpiece.

“Goodbye, David. What about dinner some time next week?

Good. We’ll arrange that.”

George gave an easy smile all round, and as he closed the door firmly behind him he took a deep breath of relief. David was a very decent chap, even if his politics were impossible, but why did he have such peculiar friends?

Burns was all right. Except that he went about too much with Marain. He had certainly got in with the wrong crowd if he really wanted to understand England. Once Burns had admitted frankly that the most difficult thing he had to learn at Oxford was the English. What was it that David had said last summer? We are becoming a nation of professional eccentrics. Foreigners provide us with a stage, and we enjoy our little appearances all the more because we convince every one, including ourselves, that we don’t even notice the audience.” George frowned for a moment, and then he laughed to himself.

That was just David being David. Odd fellow, David, and yet likable. But he wasn’t normal: falling heavily in love, wanting to get married, giving up all idea of the Foreign Office. Definitely not normal.

George swung his long leg over his bicycle—his driving 187’ licence had been suspended last week after a normal argument with a normal haystack at the normal speed of sixty-five miles an hour—and pedalled his way briskly to his normal rooms in the High. There would be a decent dinner at the Grid tonight, and it would probably work up to some fun in the Quad afterwards round a bonfire. There were at least two chaps disliked enough this term to have the furniture in their rooms supply firewood. And that little pipsqueak, with the green pullover and the lisp, who quoted Mallarme at you would have to be de bagged Matter of discipline. All perfectly normal.

Yes, George decided, as he found the reflection in the looking-glass quite satisfactory and shook out a crisply laundered handkerchief to slip into his cuff, yes, it was going to be a very pleasant evening. All normal chaps there, thank God.

Chapter Twenty-one.

POST-MORTEM ON FRIENDSHIP.

They listened to George’s heavy brogue shoes clattering down the staircase.

David put the copy of transition back in its place.

George, he was thinking, usually remembered things: he must have been more rattled by Marain than he had looked.

“What’s wrong with that guy, anyway?” Burns asked bluntly.

“Or are we typhoid-carriers?” “Oh, he’s all right,” David said.

Marain was wandering about the room now, picking up the invitation cards standing on the mantelpiece, reading them with well-concealed interest and apparent amusement. David watched him with a grin, and paused in talking to Burns to remove some open letters and postcards out of Marain’s eyeshot.

“Against the rules, old man, when the owner is in his rooms,” he remarked, and turned to Burns again. Burns was smiling too. Marain looked quite unperturbed, picked up a magazine, and sat down to read it.

“Go on about Fenton-Stevens,” Burns said.

“What do you mean by all right?” Burns was a direct man who approached arguments eagerly: he considered them the fair means for an exchange of information.

“I’ve met him half a dozen times, and he always seems a fool. Very much on his dignity, and nothing to be dignified about except what his father has given him.”

“Was Marain with you these half-dozen times?” David asked. Burns’s eyebrows went up at this new idea.

Marain looked away from the magazine.

“Why waste good breath on a first-rate fool? What do you see in such an idiot, David?”

“Perhaps you have a bad effect on him,” David said quietly.

“He paralyses me,” Marain said.

“He has an infinite capacity for being tedious. He will do well in the Foreign Office. One of our future policy-makers. God help us.” He adjusted his body comfortably in the best chair, poured himself some beer, and turned a page of the magazine. He raised an eyebrow at some statement which caught his eye, and dismissed the others from his presence.

“That’s my point,” Burns went on.

“He thinks he is a natural for the governing classes. Right education, right connexions, right everything. Does that make a man a natural for anything except having himself a whale of a time? The life of Riley, ;’/ you can get it. And those who have it damned well see that they keep it in the family.

Take a guy like this Fenton-Stevens. He and his crowd just represent less than two per cent of the population: all the other ninety-eight per cent don’t talk like him or live his way. But he is convinced he is typical of Britain, and so he and his friends have got to represent her. Matter of duty, I suppose. It is also the life of Riley: better than going down a mine, or delivering milk, or wearing the seat of your pants out on a clerk’s hard chair. They’ll tell you, of course, that the miner or the milkman or the clerk just haven’t got the stuff it takes to do the governing or save the country. How do they know that? Who told them except themselves? If you ask me, this country is weighted down with its dead wood—the “all right” guys who use up the best jobs. And you all keep accepting it, instead of using an axe.” “The trouble about using an axe,” David said, ‘is that it may be used against you, and that isn’t according to plan. Perhaps Marain’s next editorial would see him installed in a neat six by-eight-foot cell. That is, if his political opponents grabbed the axe before he could.”

Marain looked up to say, “It is quite simple. David wants no action, and is content to continue with things as they are, although it is against his interests and the interests of forty million other people in this country. They don’t seem to understand where their interests lie. That’s all.” That’s all,” David said, ‘except that you did not state my case accurately.

I want change too. But I believe that change will depend on just how much the majority of us want something. If we are content with the second best because it is ” safe,” then we shall just go on getting a good second best.

So the decision really rests with all the forty million people Marain pities so much. That’s where I begin to disagree with him. I believe that if there is to be a change they have to earn it for themselves. Not by violence, but by thinking things out. Get an intelligent electorate, and then an intelligent election, and soon there will be plenty of house-cleaning.

Provided, of course, that the people go on thinking things out for themselves.

As soon as they stop doing that, dead wood will collect again, no matter what variety of political party is in power.”

“He would have been a most converting missionary,” Marain said to Burns, and his annoyance sharpened when the American did not return his amused smile.

Burns was, in fact, still watching David. Tt is getting rather late,” Marain said suddenly, and rose to his feet.

“I’m giving dinner to Furness in Hall tonight. We are starting a new magazine, and I was thinking of him as assistant editor. He is a sound man in many ways.”

And writes like a piece of boiled ham, David thought. No sense of the use of the English language at all. Marain would be editor, of course: Marain played second fiddle to no man.

“I thought of you,” Marain went on, ‘but you are frightfully busy this year, aren’t you?” And that meant that Marain had come here with the idea of offering the job of assistant editor to David. I am being disciplined, David thought. Really, Marain, you do like to crack the whip. To hell with you!

Burns looked surprised at Marain’s recent statements, and then he said quickly, in embarrassment.

“We are calling it Experiment. Here’s the blurb. Wrote it this morning.” He pulled out a folded sheet of typescript, which had already been handled a good deal during its short life. David took it, and read it as he was persuading himself that he had indeed no time to be editing a magazine this spring.

“It isn’t a purely Oxford affair,” Burns was saying.

“There will be contributors from Cambridge and London. We hope.”

“Better give the Cambridge men more space on the editorial board if you want to keep them interested,” David said, and then regretted his words. For Marain’s smile became real at his obvious annoyance.

“Hello,” David said suddenly, in surprise.

“How did he get here?” He pointed to the name of Roger Breen.

“One of the London boys. Marain found him.” Burns explained.

“He’s financing us.”

“You mean his father is. And his father won’t like your magazine.” “His father can’t read,” Marain said.

“Look, Marain, why get involved with a man like Breen? He is only using you politically as he is using his father financially.”

Marain wasn’t smiling now. Burns was looking at him questioningly, as if he believed Bosworth. By attacking Breen, Bosworth was attacking his judgment.

“I can deal with Breen,” he said coldly.

“What’s wrong with him, anyway?” Burns asked.

“He is only a name to me.”

“He is one of my sister’s friends,” David said shortly.

“And Bosworth doesn’t like him,” Marain explained. Sister-fixation, his amused eyebrow said.

“I know what I dislike,” David said.

“He must be very grim,” Marain said lightly.

“If it becomes fashionable among the so-called intelligentsia to wear black shirts, Breen will be out there in front of them mimicking Mussolini.”