He had always assumed that in the nature of things he was one of the better sort – he would have flung a handful of gold to the respectful peasantry before galloping on to the aid of the king. It was an assumption that he hardly questioned openly, for he was feeling little more than a hint of the immense force of English social pressures and he had only a vague suspicion about how they were to impinge upon him, only the most cloudy doubts about where he fitted in. He scarcely questioned the assumption; but now he would be glad to be confirmed in it, for underlying all this there was the remotely glimpsed possibility that he might be found to belong to the other side, that his mother might learn of this and cast him off.
And then what constituted a gentleman? He had always thought he knew – perfectly obvious – but as he grew older and more concerned he found that the manifold definitions that he had somehow acquired were often contradictory. He was a candid little boy, with remarkably little social sense, and he did not know how to distinguish the cant and the half-cant from the facts. Gentlemen were both good and bad, it seemed, pure and rakish; they were always polite and well-bred, yet look at old Mr Holden of the Hall, to say nothing of Henry VIII. Gentility had nothing to do with wealth, they said: but did it not? Amos came to do the heavy digging on odd days, and when he was preparing the big square bed he came across one strangely shaped seed-potato among the King Edwards that he was setting. ‘That’s an ash-leaf,’ he said, showing it to Richard. ‘It won’t give you but four or five to one. A real gentleman’s potato,’ he added, in a respectful tone.
Somewhere in the present world there was a shuddering noise, a crepitation: could it have been gunfire, or a bomb? But it was not repeated and it only made the slightest check in his meditation, scarcely enough to change the current of his thoughts.
In a few moments his faint questioning had died away; he was back again, and he was remembering school – school, and how he had asked Gay about these things. In this case his visual image was so luminous and strong that if there had been a calendar on the wall of the room he saw he would have read the date: but in fact he could place this time exactly in time, because it was the term before the scholarship fiasco, and the very first day of that term, to be precise.
The first day of term, and yet the place had just the same atmosphere as if the school had never been closed – the ammoniac smell of little boys, the taste and feeling of chalk and dust, the combined odours of deal, ink, school-books and coke. It was a comforting atmosphere, for although the last day of the holidays had been sad, conventionally sad, it had been a holiday particularly full of domestic unpleasantness and punishment, and the old unchanging world of school had been very welcome to him, especially now that he was one of the big boys, in the headmaster’s form and beyond the reach of any tyranny. Yet he had not been in the place more than a few hours before change and impermanence showed themselves and dispelled the warmth. The headmaster sent for him and said, ‘Well, Richard, and how did you leave your father and mother?’
‘Very well, thank you, sir,’ said Richard, and the old gentleman gazed at him for some minutes. Mr Fielding was an old friend of his mother’s father; he was indeed one of Mrs Temple’s very few relatives, though exceedingly remote, and he had known her all his life. He was educating Richard for nothing (not that Richard knew this) and when he was speaking in a private, unofficial capacity he called him by his Christian name; Richard was therefore surprised and aggrieved when the headmaster went on, ‘You know, my dear boy, your mother is very worried about your chances of a scholarship. I told her that I had got stupider boys through; but I was obliged to add that your chances were by no means as good as we could wish.’
These words provided him with three very disagreeable reflections at once: the first brought into his unwilling mind the fact that the comfortable everlasting world of school would have an end – that it might go on, but not with him, who must leave quite soon; the second, that his progress to a public school (which he preferred to leave in the vagueness of a remote future) was neither automatic nor certain; and the third, the least important, that he would be compelled to work much harder.
‘Why are you looking so mumchance?’ asked Gay.
‘You must realise that Latin, not drawing or French, is the key to a scholarship,’ said Richard, in an imitation of Mr Fielding’s voice, as he plucked his books from the desk in the quietest corner at the back where they had elected to sit together. ‘I am to go up in front,’ he said, with much resentment, ‘and am to stay in on Wednesdays to do Common Entrance papers. It’s all’ – (lowering his voice a little, for he was speaking of a great man) – ‘ballocks.’
Of course it was all ballocks, he asserted: anyone could get a sons-of-clergy closed scholarship. Gill had got one, and Gill notoriously wetted his bed – Gill had warts. Besides, everybody went to a public school: it was part of the process and nothing else was thinkable. Most would try for scholarships: Gay was going in for a Winchester scholarship; but he would go there, whether he got it or not. Only cads went to common schools – indeed, they were called cads’ schools.
It was absurd to think of Gay failing, or Gay’s friends, for that matter: Gay was one of those naturally fortunate creatures who never fail. He had bright blue eyes in a round and jolly face, and he did not give a damn for anything. He could have been one of the chief bloods of the school if he had chosen, but he was not at all competitive, and he would not take even cricket seriously. Even so, he remained one of the most popular boys there, and Richard was lucky to have him as a particular friend; for Richard was not a popular boy. Perhaps no boy is ever much liked unless his values are just the same as those of his contemporaries and unless he has the same sense of tact, which Richard had not. There was a curious piece of iron, for example, that lay on a shelf in the hall; one day Richard took it, because he had always coveted its spiny shape. He showed it to his friends, but after some initial excitement they had hesitated and then they had withdrawn their moral support. Many things could be taken, such as elastic bands and things from the laboratory, but somehow meteorites were not among them and they all knew it, except Richard. There were many things like that that he got just wrong. But his unpopularity, at its worst, was never more than a mild unpopularity, being mitigated by his good looks and his courage: he was far more aggressive than Gay, and it would not do to meddle with him. Most little boys are cowards, and when they fight it is upon the tacit understanding that neither will go too far; but Richard could not be relied upon to keep in bounds.
He and Gay had always got along well together, but it was only in the last year that they had been such close friends, drawn together, it must be admitted, by the abominable vice of sodomy. Gay very much admired Richard’s talent for drawing, and Richard had illustrated most of his books: Richard also made drawings for Gay’s primitive, mediæval jokes – some few of them were clean, but Gay’s mind was very like a sink, and most of them had to circulate under double oaths of secrecy. Not that Gay was exceptional in this; Grafton was a rather dirty school at that time, and it was not particularly Gay’s influence that had turned the top form into a little suburb of Sodom – a cheerful and unselfconscious Sodom, however, for it was an unusually happy school.
It was from Gay, too, that Richard had caught the habit of reading. But it was unfortunate for Richard that Kipling should have been Gay’s favourite author, for Kipling’s curious image of the world was not the most reassuring one for him. To enjoy Kipling you need a strong stomach, a certainty of the Herrenvolk’s existence, and an unshaken conviction that you belong to it.
And Gay had always been a fount of worldly knowledge. Long before this, when they were both little boys in the lowest form, he had been able to give Richard some idea of what was the thing in that particular community: in the kindest way he had said, ‘You don’t want to be a blooming arse with your French, you know, going on like a foreigner. The chaps are laughing at you.’ Laura Temple had been educated at Lausanne; she spoke beautiful French and had taught Richard very early and very well, but even after he had been at school for some time he had still not grasped the atmosphere of the place better than to go on angering Mr Frisby and the rest of the class with this odious perfection.
Richard would never make such a gaffe now – he was