He had an answer to this one. He was becoming morbidly self-centred; what he needed was to interest himself in other people. The two spinsters, for instance, the don and Miss What’s-it. They were probably around his own age; the don seemed a little older, the nurse a little younger, but that was largely conditioning, he thought. To start with something concrete, he speculated whether they were virgins. The don, obviously. The nurse, more doubtful; women in professions of this kind lost so many inhibitions, they gave little away. If she had had experience it had probably been below her real standard (she was far from stupid) and she had too much sense to dress it up, but would probably repeat it. The don, now, looked the type to believe in soul-mates. Her imagination would work strictly on the day-shift. As for the rest, she would hope uncomfortably that it was all right if people really loved each other.
At this point, his mind was arrested by an unsought memory of the girl who had come that day, standing and swinging the garden gate. He recalled his own remark about a honeymoon couple, which had sprung from an instant conviction that they were nothing of the kind. Doubt and hesitation, and a decision still ahead, had been written all over her. He did not know why he had said it; to find out what the don would say or out of some casual protective instinct towards the girl, born of a guess that they would have registered under the same name. But, of course, there was this business now about identity cards. It must make things awkward. At this point, something caused him to consult his watch. One-fifteen. Well, he remarked to himself with a rather forced brutality, she probably knew all about it by now. He could not much admire her taste; an obvious type, like an advertisement for shaving cream. A pity to have chosen him for the first attempt; he looked too self-satisfied to take much pains with his routine. It would be too bad if she were let in for any serious dependence on him. She didn’t look very well able to take care of herself.
Considering this prospect on her behalf, Neil had got outside his own concerns to a degree which deliberate effort, often attempted, had failed to achieve. Perhaps for this reason, his mind suddenly broke off. Everything he had been thinking grew unreal and remote. Something had happened, at a different level, while these surface reflections had been going on, which had nothing to do with them or with their subject. He had shaken himself free. It would not last; but, for the moment, the thing which had been a part of his blood and bones had become external. It was attached to him, but like something on a length of chain; not to be escaped from, but able to be looked at from without, and, if he would, seen whole. He had known that this moment would some time come, had longed for it, and begun to despair of its arrival. Now that it was here, he wanted to pretend to himself that it was not. He had not foreseen, till it was on him, the strain and labour it would mean. Tomorrow, some other day. It was late, he was tired; it was no more the hour for it than for stripping off one’s clothes to swim an icy stream. There are streams, however, which widen at each refusal, becoming impassable seas. He knew this; for a moment, idly tracing back the train of thought which had sprung this ordeal on him, he remembered with a grudge the girl at the gate. It was pointless, a delaying action; he dismissed her from his mind. Suddenly the ghost of exhilaration moved in him, like the tension he had felt sometimes on the first difficult pitch of a big climb. As if for a physical effort, he flexed himself, his arms behind his head.
His mind began to cast about in the past, backward and forward, seeking a point to begin.
He had taken up teaching without any sense of vocation, but not as a frustrated pis-aller. It was a thing he could do, within a reasonable distance of his own standards. It would not make him miserable, he knew, unless he continued trying to write. It was possible that he could have made a living by writing (he had had reason, since, to think it even probable) but at twenty-three he had allowed himself exalted ideas. It had not seemed to him worth doing, in its present phase of over-production, unless one could hope to reach the level of the minor classics. At twenty-four he decided that his abilities were not, and never would be, of this order, and made one of those ceremonial bonfires one regrets ten years later. Having put it behind, he was determined not to let it go sour on him. Later exercises he regarded firmly as recreation. These included a few translations which had had a respectable press, of the kind neither to crush nor to elate. They had been a professional asset, and he had taken a prosaic satisfaction in this.
Having come to his work without high dreams or serious sense of defeat, he had avoided the pitfalls of the disillusioned idealist and of the unwilling hack. He liked boys on the whole, without depending for any indispensable satisfaction on their returning it, and retained a sense of humour about them. He stood no nonsense, not because he was an eager disciplinarian, but because he had no time for it. It pleased, but also amused him, to find himself the kind of master about whose ruthlessness rumours are spread by boys who stand well with him, from motives of conceit.
The gradual discovery that he was a success had, at some deeper level, faintly alarmed him. He had not set enough store by the artist in himself to allow it any dignities or rights; but, threatened with assimilation, the creature took fright and protested. By this time, however, he was sufficiently confident to help himself to as much escapism as he felt he could use. Into climbing, by degrees, he put most of what he had put into writing before. One of the few things that got on his nerves was to find stories about it leaking round the school. It appealed, of course, to the boys; it was an asset, and, unlike the translations, it was not a thing to be capitalised. He had developed the need of a private citadel.
Like many people whose choice of a career has been in the first place rather casual, he retained at bottom, mostly unknown to himself, the approach of an amateur. Until he was over thirty, school had seemed a place where he happened to be. The boys felt (and the more intelligent realised it) the absence of the parochial spirit; it was perhaps the main factor in his popularity. He saved money, partly because his tastes were simple, partly to retain for the unassimilated part of him its feeling of independence.
Then the war came.
Suddenly it all began to close in. He tried to volunteer in ‘39; but the Head pleaded with him, and as nothing much was happening it seemed unreasonable to refuse. One by one, as their age-groups were reached, the younger masters went; retired dug-outs took their places; the responsibilities of the permanent staff increased. With a sense of something like outrage, he began to feel himself classed among the older men. Imperceptibly he had begun to take for granted his prestige among the boys; he had accumulated, by now, an adventurous legend. In 1940 he went to the Head again. The Head, a not insincere old man but also a clever one, unbent and told him his troubles. He went away, as he had been meant to go, feeling that to anticipate his call-up would be a subtle self-indulgence. In implanting this idea, the Head had soundly gauged his man. Without arrogance Neil was sure enough of himself to believe he would do as well in the Army as the next. Climbing had accustomed him to physical danger and emergency, as well as to hardship; he had had no trouble in handling boys so anticipated none in handling men. He was still young enough to feel sometimes that it might be better not to outlive one’s prime; and, though aware that war could present death in many disgusting forms, he did not fear death itself because its near approaches had always come, so far, at moments of self-sought effort and exhilaration. In common with many climbers at such times, he had never felt fear till after the crisis was over. He had far more dread of taking life than of losing it; but, with the confused conscience of the time, saw this as an egotism to be conquered by the will. All in all, he felt he had a good deal to lose by standing aside from the common experience; so, when thus appealed to, he stayed.
From this time, his sense of frustration mounted. He began to imagine that the boys looked at him differently. His temper shortened; he suspected even the old stop-gap masters (who were in fact so dependent on his authority as to be jealous of it) of wondering why he was still there. Alternatively, he dec
ided he was growing like them. It suddenly burst in on him that this war, which he had never believed would be a short one, would swallow the last years of his youth.
It was in this mood that he met Susan.
She had come as a junior nurse to the school sanatorium, taking the place of a trained one who had joined the forces. Susan herself was half trained. She told Neil all about it when, in the Matron’s off-duty time, he called to enquire after one of the boys. She had simply loved the patients in hospital, she said, but she couldn’t stand the red tape and all the stupid rules. Neil had never been in a hospital in his life, and his mental picture was of the dated kind which envisages nurses scrubbing floors, hounded by viragos. He readily believed that Susan couldn’t stand it. She was twenty-three, with red-gold hair, a transparent skin, and the appealing way which makes incompetence lovable to all except those on whom the results actually fall. Neil, used to assessing people’s aptitude for responsibility, realised from her first report on the sick boy that she must be bad at her job; but what she said about the boy himself was intelligent and amusing. She accepted and at once took Neil for granted as her own contemporary; not surprisingly, since he was the first man between eighteen and sixty she had seen since she came.
He came back for more of it, making sure this time of the Matron’s off-duty first. Before long they were meeting for walks safely out of bounds. One day, when the Matron had scolded her, she told him that apart from the boys he was the only human being within miles; that she thought it marvellous of him to stay on here when he was longing to get away, just to hold the place together; that of course he was right, and that if he went the poor lads would have no one to keep them in touch with real life at all. After this he allowed ten minutes to elapse before proposing, the interval being for decency’s sake. They were married in the summer holidays.
But for the war, Neil would have been a housemaster a year before but the man who would have retired had stayed on. They took a small converted cottage just outside the school grounds. The Head was delighted. He had every intention of getting Neil’s call-up deferred, took for granted that now there would be no opposition, and preferred his housemasters married in any case. He was a tough and determined old man with fixed ideas; his aim was to outstay his present deputy, and settle Neil as his successor. He never actually said so, but began now to drop Neil significant hints.
The Sanatorium Matron was also pleased by the match. Susan was the daughter of an Old Boy, and had been appointed through the Head; the Matron had begun to feel, despairingly, that it would be necessary to wait till Susan had killed someone before getting rid of her. The cut-glass decanter in the wedding display had been the lavishness of a thank-offering. Neil was partly aware of this, but it only made him laugh.
The gaps were bridged now, the vacuums filled. He had not married for intellectual companionship, never having been intellectually lonely; if he did feel like talking from that side of his mind, she listened well and was never banal. She supplied a far more urgent need; she was someone with whom he could be foolish. For the first time (his only serious love-affair before had been in most ways unhappy and strained) he was let into the secret world of private mythologies and of the little passwords which are so excruciatingly funny when innocent outsiders bring them by accident into the conversation. More by a great deal than all this, she let him find himself as a lover. He was her first, though she had naively assumed on the strength of a few flirtations the airs of experience. Because he had awakened it, her frank sensuality seemed to him a tremendous compliment. She told him often that she could never endure to have another man make love to her as long as she lived.
He had meant to put off a child until the war was over; but she wanted one because she was afraid of being called up. When Sally was born, he found that his happiness had had, after all, room for an addition. She was an individual from the first. Her hair and skin were like Susan’s; but as soon as she had grown to be more than an instinctive little animal, she turned most to Neil. He was idiotically proud of the fact that she would always stop crying when he held her, though he supposed it was only because she felt safer in a stronger grip. She was nearly a year old when Neil’s call-up papers arrived. With an unpleasant sense of shock he realised that he had pushed the whole question into the back of his mind; he no longer wanted to go. He tried not to realise this at first, knowing that if he did he would let nothing stand in his way.
The Head, when notified, said that there must have been a clerical error. Neil realised suddenly that this might well be true; the Head had been pulling wires and saying nothing about it. He had influential contacts, and, in the staff situation, a pretty good case. Neil came back and told Susan that he would have to get going at once. They had their first quarrel about it. She had guessed his mental processes, and told him in as many words that he was sacrificing her, and Sally, and the school to his own pride. He could put up little defence to this; in a sense it was true. He tried to explain his own point of view, which was that if he stayed he would go downhill till he ceased to be worth keeping; she replied that if he had such irrational feelings he ought to be strong-minded and conquer them. They were wretched together until the day before he left, when she had a passionate fit of remorse which would have been lacerating enough if he had had no choice. He believed in his own work and thought it necessary; he was going, not from an abstract sense of right but because the particular structure of his self-respect demanded it. It was the kind of issue about which his mind worked clearly; he did not attempt to evade it. Since the thing was done, however, he prepared himself as best he could to do it well.
In all this he had reckoned without his hosts. The Head, dogged to the last, had had another pull at the wires. From his own point of view he failed; but he had driven home, quite successfully, Neil’s qualifications. The Army Educational Corps opened its arms to him. When he resisted the embrace, he was told reprovingly that this was a specialists’ war; the square-peg era was over. Didn’t he want to serve his country where he could be most useful? Well, quite. He would therefore report at the training depot in the Midlands to which he had been posted. No; the schools of mountain warfare had their own complement of instructors by now: after all, the war had been going for some time.
He remained at the depot, commissioned, comfortable, and not much troubled even by air raids, till the end of the war.
Two things lightened the first crushing weeks of anticlimax. The first was Susan’s joyful relief. This struck him as quite illogical, for he seemed to himself to have justified all her strictures; he had simply got into khaki, and had been far less dispensable at home. The other concerned Sally. He hated to miss the years of her quick early growth; but her dependence on him had begun to grow alarming, and Susan had accepted it with disquieting placidity. She liked to please, but hated responsibility. He had wanted a child; she had given him one; he was satisfied: the uncomfortable interruption has justified itself. Neil, who did not fear responsibility but had studied the psychology of children, had not been entirely happy about it all. Now things would adjust themselves.
The months crawled by and clotted into years. Draft after draft arrived, leaving when the dullards had begun to display gleams of interest, and the lively minds to turn to him as a friend. Between all of them and himself was a drawn sword with its edge turned away from him. An old boy from the school, happening to pass through his hands, wrote to a friend that Langers had got positively subdued, and looked quite a bit older.
He spent his leave periods with Susan in hotels. She had never found housekeeping easy even before scarcities began, and made it clear now that she could do with some leave herself. He did not doubt that her life was harder than his. Once, at his request, she brought Sally, but it was impossibly difficult and they did not repeat it; a sister of Susan’s took the child in. He was not within reach of any climbing on a short pass; it had to go.
Susan, it seemed to him, was changing; but everything was changing or had changed.
The twelve years between them increasingly appeared. He had hoped that the gap would narrow rather than widen; but he thought of the outgoing drafts, and his unhappiness seemed a self-indulgence. Things would straighten out when he got back.
All this was only the preface; it was a background over which his memory ranged at random, setting this in perspective or that. What he had before him tonight was to compose the foreground. This was the thing that had always defeated him, because much of it had to be done without the help of memory. The centre, which he knew, depended for its truth on a complex of lines and shades which only his imagination could supply; and always, when he tried to fill them in, they had toned themselves to the violent colours of his own pain. Helpless and exhausted he had forbidden himself to think about it; everything had been tainted by the knowledge that there was this rotten place, skinned over, in his mind. For the first time, tonight he had felt emotion loosen its stranglehold; if he kept his will steady, he could use knowledge instead, and make deductions of the unknown from the known. If he could do this, it was possible that even from his own part of it he could stand a little away.
Getting out of bed, he opened the door that led to the iron stair. There was a dark, deep sky outside; a three-parts-rounded moon had quelled the stars. The sea sounded, so faintly that it was only as if the silence stirred and said hush. He laid himself down again. Now.
It must have been a year or more after he left the school that the bulldozers came to the big meadow a couple of miles away, the pioneers followed, and the huts went up. The next move was the Head’s, he convened a masters’ meeting and moved the bounds half a mile in.
Marks and Canning, of course, would be the first boys to break them; returning like Joshua’s spies with material treasures, electric torches and compasses and gum, pressed on them by their hosts to console them for the attempts of an archaic system to crush their enterprise. Fanciful rumours were ousted by glowing reports; if you seemed keen and didn’t put on side, the Yanks would go to a lot of trouble to show you how things worked. Marks and Canning learned how to operate a searchlight and (in theory) how to construct the framework of a skyscraper and drill for oil. They had acquired faultless accents and an impeccable use of idiom before, having displayed their accomplishments rashly, they were watched one night and caught.