Noble in Reason (16 page)

On either side of a line uncertainly drawn . . . men and women tended to form into two flocks, into two species. On the one side were the Humble and Meek, on the other, those who were Proud in the imagination of their hearts.

The division drawn by the Abbé does not of course, as he proceeds to explain, correspond to definite social classes or purely economic standards. It is a difference of spiritual attitude. The line is a vertical one drawn down through all classes, all sections, of society, between those who desire to share and love, and those who prefer to grab and hate. I perhaps aligned myself when young partly on account of unworthy and selfish motives, but at least I chose the right side. I must admit that I find it less easy now than I did then to remain meek—but at least I know it.

The loneliness experienced by the adolescent is a matter of grave importance to the community, for it is at this point that the youth, boy or girl, breaks into anti-social activity or grows into a well-adjusted citizen. Is this loneliness greater nowadays
than before? Some of our most trusted thinkers appear to believe that the Industrial Revolution created a society from which the artist must feel eternally alienated, and that the present adolescent unrest springs from the same source. This may be so, and yet I feel that Catiline's conspiracy, for example, was run by a kind of cosh-gang of neurasthenic Old Etonians, and that the artist in any generation, unless he happens to be born into a family already devoted to that art, has a hard row to hoe. Indeed it is only to be expected that the affectionate lay parents should feel dubious of the wisdom of his child's attempting an art; the livelihood being so uncertain, the emotional ups-and-downs so distressing.

To return, however, to my own case. I have recently read an interesting study of some modern writers, entitled
Rehearsals of Discomposure,
by Nathan A. Scott, in which three different types of loneliness are defined. A human being may feel, says Dr. Scott, isolated because alienated from the contemporary community, or isolated because structurally discontinuous from all other human beings, or as it were cosmically isolated because the conditions of human life in the universe are intrinsically unfavourable to human happiness. He cites a formidable array of modern philosophers, poets and novelists who have felt this cosmic unease, caused by humanity being pulled in one direction by (to quote Kafka) his heavenly collar and in the other by his earthly collar, so that one or the other is always throttling him. Hardy of course has the same idea, which he expresses by blaming the Immanent Will for furnishing humanity with aspirations which directly contradict the Will's mere life-production aim. But the young Chris Jarmayne did not feel this cosmic loneliness at this stage. Nor did he worry about structural discontinuity with other humans; he enjoyed being a separate individual entity. It was my alienation from the community around me which gave me so much pain.

There were then in the provinces few or none of those agreeable societies, so mistakenly jeered at by the sophisticated, in which the lover of chess or chrysanthemums, pigeons or plays, can meet with like enthusiasts and find pleasure in their company. (Musical societies existed, for most West Riding people love, if on differing levels, most kinds of music; but I was not musical.) Accordingly I never met anyone who had the same interests as myself. It was as if a sentence of solitary confinement had been passed upon me. If I now spend much time on such societies, which now abound, it is from a very real sense of what they may mean to lonely youth. All the same, in my ingenuous youthful hopefulness I never questioned that there was a good life somewhere, if only I could reach it; somewhere, I felt sure, there were people who could talk really knowledgeably about Balzac or Dostoevsky, which had now become my rather more advanced criterion of culture. I looked about eagerly for such people, I scanned the horizon, at the first sign of literary interest in anyone I met I charged down on them with hordes of questions and frightened them away. But fellow-litterateurs remained obstinately beyond the purple rim as far as I was concerned, and I had neither the knowledge nor perhaps the courage to seek them over the hills.

Still, I feel that, as I said, I made some progress during this period, in spite, or perhaps because, of my unhappiness. I missed a clue in connection with my textile failure. I might have said then: “That is how others feel when they cannot understand things that I easily understand.” But I could not see that yet. On the other hand, when I perceived that my poor mother's temptation was in essence the same as mine, and when I aligned myself with the injured and oppressed, I had taken a definite step forward, for I had at least learned that there were others who suffered like myself. Also, though my agonized struggles to give up my daydreams altogether
failed, I acquired a technique with which I could control them at will temporarily.

But I would not go through this period again for anything that could be offered me—unless indeed I could buy at such a heavy price the power to create a masterpiece, which is unfortunately not very probable.

The great gong of greed and anger clanged, and Europe was at war.

Patriotic enthusiasm is now so suspect that it is difficult to throw myself back into the warm, simple, straightforward feelings of 1914. But war had not then been recognized as a discredited instrument and universal curse; all history, much fiction and drama and even a good deal of poetry, was concerned with war, and phrases like
with your shield or on it, gallant and glorious
and
dulce et decorum pro patria mori
gave it a golden flourish of trumpets. We loved England with all our hearts; after a long series of provocations the abominable Germans had at length torn up their guarantee of Belgium's neutrality, characterizing it as a mere “scrap of paper,” and invaded “gallant little Belgium” and France; England rushed to implement her promises and go to their support. In these clear and simple terms the youth of England saw the situation and hurried to the recruiting offices.

I watched them go with a wistful, passionate yearning, a painful excitement; for I can truly say that it would be difficult for anyone's love for England to exceed my own, and every instinct of my young manhood throbbed with desire to serve her in this dangerous, glorious, adventurous, soldiering way. But—this is scarcely credible but true—at first it never entered my head that I should be allowed to do so. Such exciting adventures were not for Chris Jarmayne, I thought; I could
not imagine ever securing my father's permission to go. Occasionally, in the first few weeks of the war, I tried to screw up my courage to mention the matter to him, but never got further than throwing out a few general remarks, such as that the age limits for recruits were 19 and 35, the minimum height 5 ft. 6, there was a recruiting office at the Hudley Drill Hall, and so on. To these feelers my father made no reply. As retreat and disaster increasingly overtook the British Expeditionary Force, my longing to be in France with them became increasingly anguished and my anger against the circumstances which (as I thought) thwarted this desire increased to match. The little street which contained the frontage of Hilbert Mills turned off Station Road, and accordingly the first considerable departure of the men from our local regiment was just visible from our office windows. There were flags, there were bands, there were cheers; the drumbeats stirred my blood; the lines of marching men in khaki called me irresistibly to their side. My nose pressed against the window-pane, I exclaimed in tones of heartfelt longing to John, who was standing at my side:

“Oh, I do
wish
I could join the Army!”

“Why don't you then?” snapped John.

I looked at him in amazement. He was not at his best that morning. Edie had been brought to bed with her fourth child the night before; something went wrong and the child, their first and as it proved last boy, seemed unlikely to survive. John had the harassed and ungroomed look of a man who has been up all night amid domestic troubles with which he is not qualified to cope. Remembering this, I made no reply to him except a doubtful and deprecating smile.

“What's stopping you?” said John as before.

Did he mean, could he really mean, that he had been expecting me to enlist and was astonished and disappointed that I had not done so? I gaped at him; his look of irritated
disgust certainly bore out this view. I turned to my father, who was sitting at his desk. He too had the air of one who has long wished to utter a disagreeable truth, and now hears it spoken with virtuous relief. A hot tide of colour flooded into my face and neck. I exclaimed: “Well!” in a tone of fury and snatching my cap from its peg rushed from the room.

My thoughts as I hurried along the streets were turbulent and unpleasant. My behaviour had been fatuous. I had concealed and repressed my wishes, believing myself to be acting with noble self-sacrifice, while my father and John thought me a cowardly, cold-blooded, self-indulgent young ninny. Well! Let it be a lesson to me, I told myself, almost weeping with rage; in future I would assert myself, I would declare my wishes boldly. I reached the queue outside the Drill Hall—the march of the battalion had stirred the emotions of other young men besides myself—and joined it. Gradually, as my face cooled and my heart-beats slowed, I began to smile. After all, I was getting my wish. I should soon be in the Army, “in” the war. Rain fell as we waited; some of my companions turned up their coat-collars and crouched into such shelter as the buttresses of the building offered, but I stood erect and let the shower drench me; henceforward I was to be a hardy out-of-doors man, a soldier.

When at last I had nearly reached the desk behind which an officer was sitting, a sergeant tapped me on the arm.

“Fall out, my lad,” he said.

Thrilled by this military term though a trifle uncertain of its meaning, I hesitantly stepped aside.

“No use coming here with specs on,” said the sergeant with affable contempt.

“What do you mean?”

“We can't take you—you're rejected. Don't hold the line up now. Go out by this door.”

“But that's absurd,” I began.

“Are we taking any with glasses, sir?” cried the sergeant to the officer.

“No. Sorry, my lad,” said the captain, smiling at me.

I stumbled out of the further door, followed by the commiserating glances of the other recruits.

To return to my father and John immediately after this humiliating experience was quite impossible. I made up my mind to try elsewhere, took a train to Bradford, inquired for the nearest place of enlistment and once again joined a line of young men. This time I placed my glasses—they were pincenez, for spectacles were then considered plebeian wear—in my pocket before I approached and kept them there, though the long wait—the military lunch-hour intervened—was very tedious as a result. At last the work of recruitment was resumed. My age and height were appropriate; my name was written down and I found myself with my coat and shirt off awaiting my turn for a somewhat cursory medical inspection, which however proved not cursory enough for me. While waiting I looked about with some curiosity at the hairy chests and bulging biceps of my fellow recruits, and felt painfully conscious of my own thin arms and rib-revealing torso. As usual, however, I consoled myself for my physical defects by dwelling on my mental powers: probably nobody else in the room knew what the word
torso
meant, I reflected smugly.

My satisfaction was short-lived, for almost the first question the M.O. asked me was whether I usually wore glasses. The red marks at the side of my nose, perhaps too something peering and uncertain in my advance, had betrayed my infirmity. I stammered assent.

“Sergeant! Don't waste my time sending in unfit men,” he commanded in an angry shout, and I found myself hustled out with some contumely.

My return to Hudley was very wretched. To be so utterly useless, such a complete failure in everything I attempted, to
be doomed always to stand aside from every manly activity, was very bitter. There being no train for Hudley due for some time, I returned by means of connecting trams: a dreary, bumpy, lengthy journey. Indeed as I entered the Hudley tram at the midway hill-top village, I found myself stared at unsympathetically by driver and conductor, who were lounging within the otherwise empty tram and resented my interruption of their few moments' leisure, I reached the nadir of depression. Would it not be well, for all concerned as well as for my miserable self, to cease my wretched existence? To destroy myself as Henry had done? I began positively to think of methods of suicide, when the conductor chanced to observe to the driver, in a slow exchange of sentences about the war (which was going extremely ill), that somebody called “our Arthur” had been turned down at the barracks on account of his eyes.

“He wears specs, you see.”

I leaned towards him and in a thin uncertain voice said: “So have I.”

The conductor and driver turned upon me their solid Yorkshire faces, which gradually melted into expressions of sympathy as they took this in.

“It's a bad do,” said the conductor, meaning the war and all its works.

“It is that,” agreed the driver.

Not knowing how else to express their sympathy, the conductor rose and enquiring my destination carefully punched a ticket for me, while the driver, solemnly shaking his head, made his way out to the tram's front, assuming their duties on my account before their time.

Their homely kindness saved me. I discovered suddenly that two suicides in a family would be really too much of a good thing; my death would reflect badly on the Jarmaynes, cause grief to my mother, upset Netta. Several passengers now
mounted the tram, which shortly started; a fine landscape of hills and mill chimneys debouched before my eyes; it was “not Yorkshire” to kill oneself, I decided, the true bravery lay in acceptance and endurance of life's trials. Thus the worst of my suffering was over before I reached Hilbert Mills, and by putting a strong control upon myself I was able to walk into the office and announce with some calm that the Army had rejected me on grounds of faulty eyesight.