as well as the lechers – and there was a strong sense of class distinction, which ran, apart from a few obvious inversions, upon exactly the same lines as those which divided Easton Colborough into its unnumbered castes. Indeed it would have been necessary to escape from England altogether to escape from this pressure: he was more conscious of it now, and he coped with it as well as he could, with little regard for honesty and without much skill … he must often have made himself ridiculous, and he certainly made himself disliked.
Yet though his prating, his dogmatism, his violence and his affectation rather told against him in gatherings of more than a few people, he could be agreeable in a simple relationship, a tête à tête; and upon the whole he enjoyed those last years of play. He was, in some respects, an undifferentiated youth, scarcely to be distinguished from the herd of his contemporaries, who all looked very much alike; and in the same way the greater part of his young women (the principal source of his joys and pains) were undifferentiated girls. Though indeed there were some lovely exceptions. He had abounding health and vitality and the energy usual at his age; the smell of the streets and the plane trees were aphrodisiac, and he was as amorous as a dove. Love had come late to him, but this was obviously through no irremediable block, for the emotion was very strong – a great turbulence of spirit; yet it was less an exclusive desire for any one girl than for all nubile womankind and although the affectionate and sentimental side of his nature attempted to disguise this from him in fact he often behaved with so shocking a degree of two-faced promiscuity that it was surprising that he was able to maintain his conviction that he was an excellent and virtuous man.
He rarely knew any of them well: he was barely acquainted with them as people, and indeed most of them were vague enough to be mistaken for one another in the dark. Perhaps there is not often much friendship between young men and women, and certainly there cannot be much intimacy of mind where each is preoccupied by a rôle. He did not know many of them, and now in the course of a somewhat caddish enumeration he found that many of them he could not remember except as part of a picture: their names, unbacked by any definite character, had faded, and they were replaced by the shape of hands, body, face and colour. A likely wench may be told by the jut of her bum: it really meant her likeliness, no doubt; but it was very true in another sense. He saw the lovely pearly buttocks of a round blonde girl, nacreous in the light of dawn, and himself so drained of desire that he could consider them then as objectively as he did now – a question then of light and surface; now of identification. Did not know them: and what is more, although he was passionate and sentimental he doubted whether he had even really liked the most part of them.
It was a rather subhuman activity: but most of these grapplings had another end as well – at this period he was a great talker, and his loquacity suffered from a night alone. How much he talked, and what balls; and when mendacity sickened him, he fell into the other extreme of candour; but he never would be quiet or continent. There were only two things which showed that he was capable of reticence at all: from superstitious motives as well as from piety he did not speak much of his occasional visitation, and those he did tell he told in confidence – he expected a high degree of honour in others, and discretion. The thing itself, the presence, the eudaemon, the possessor or the breath of God (as he privately considered it) had not been with him for a long time; hardly since he was in France, and only once with the same overwhelming certainty. He did not understand its laws: it would never come without industry, yet no amount of industry could bring it; it could not be surprised or forced. Yet he was sure that it had nothing to do with common goodness and that the God whose breath it was had no relation to the God he had been told about – nothing to do with religion, to which he was profoundly indifferent, if not hostile.
And then even at his most garrulous he kept his essential privacy untouched, his real nakedness. He might even have been able to bar it out of his own recollection if only every month, every Christmas, Easter and birthday had not brought a letter. At first the envelopes were typed by the people at the place where his mother was kept, but then they started coming in her hand, so completely unaltered that the sight of it made him tremble. He had opened them at first. They were odd, prim letters, obviously written under direction, impersonal and uninterested; and he had answered them in agony with trite phrases that concealed a burning prayer to be forgotten. But in time he left them unopened and answered with set phrases and a mechanical account of his progress, so far as it was acceptable. There was no difficulty in this, particularly at first: he started at the Reynolds as well as his friends could have wished – his technical abilities were far above the average and his training fitted him perfectly for the old-fashioned academic official standards reigning there. It was the best school, in that it was the oldest and that it had the most prestige; it had Academicians as lecturers and its diploma was the best qualification an art-teacher could possess; but it was an unpolished place, with an almost medical roughness, and there was nothing in its traditions to make Richard any less barbarous: worse, the best students, and particularly the painters, despised its methods and its aims after their first few terms. However, he began well. There were only two or three who could rival him, and in his first year he won the Haydon prize, which was the best the school could offer, apart from the leaving premium. Yet it was never much satisfaction to him; and even that little evaporated as he wrote it down in these dreadful letters – he could scarcely bear to look at the envelopes as he addressed them: and as for hers, he no longer opened them. Yet he could not bring himself to burn them as they came, and one after another they piled up on the far side of his mantelpiece, with his name turned down.
At the other end of the mantelpiece there was a little pile of white postcards: these came every week from Canon Harler’s bank, and he was supposed to post them back, acknowledging the thirty shillings that accompanied them, but he never did, and indeed he had some vague notion of steaming off the halfpenny stamps in time and selling them to a person in an office.
Canon Harler had cut up very ugly, very rough, when he found that he had a whore in the family and a whoreson thievish incendiary for a nephew. ‘The evil brute must have set it alight in half a dozen places at least,’ he said bitterly: yet there were people who seemed to entertain a very curious view of the whole affair, even to the extent of perverting the course of justice to protect the boy from the rightful consequences of his own actions. It was the status of these allies that staggered Canon Harler: Mr Holden of Plimpton Hall was not only a magistrate and an intimate friend of the chief constable but a deputy lieutenant, Atherton was an R.A. and Colonel Apse the cousin of an important politician. Yet these people were not only willing to square the police and the schoolmaster, but even to maintain the boy in France. As a good committee-man he felt the sense of the house and he very smoothly overrode his personal views which were strictly of the whip, cold water and Antipodes variety; for he was a man who would sell his soul for a mitre, and he did not wish to offend any man who might have interest. The canon conceived a sort of respect for Richard, because of these allies, and it lasted even after Richard’s patrons were scattered by death and the depression – Plimpton Hall empty, grass tall on the drive and in all the grey windows broken glass, the Holdens gone; and Colonel Apse, still uncertain of what had happened, trying to live on the uncommuted quarter of his pension in a boarding-house – and it made him speak humanely to Richard at the time: he had not committed himself to any personal expenditure, but he had spoken kindly and with hope – vague, indefinable semi-promises. More than that, he had later undertaken to allow Richard seventy-eight pounds a year against Mr Atherton’s legacy, though not without a very high degree of anxiety lest it should involve him in a loss; for although Mr Atherton had written Richard down for a sum that should have seen him handsomely through his studies the estate was much confused – it was extremely difficult to realise in this, the worst phase of the slump, and as far as the executors could see they would not be able to pay more than half the stated sum, and that not for several years. He was still reasonably polite when they met: the Reynolds School was well known, it was old, and it was creditable to have a connection elected to a scholarship there. When Richard won the Haydon, Canon Harler took him to the Café Royal instead of Lyons, and gave him a pound with less moral gesticulation than he usually employed over half a crown. He also said that the world was an oyster, with the general intention of alluding gracefully to a palette-knife.
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