A Question of Upbringing (21 page)

‘What is Sillery?’

I repeated some of Short’s description of Sillery, adding a few comments of my own.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Stringham. ‘I remember about him now. Well, I suppose one can try everything once.’

We were, as it happened, first to arrive at that particular party. Sillery, who had just finished writing a pile of letters, the top one of which, I could not avoid seeing, was addressed to a Cabinet Minister, was evidently delighted to have an opportunity to work over Stringham, whom he recognised immediately on hearing the name.

‘How is your mother?’ he said. ‘Do you know, I have not seen her since the private view of the Royal Academy in 1914. No, I believe we met later at a party given by Mrs. Hwfa Williams, if my memory serves me.’

He continued with a stream of questions, and for once Stringham, who had shown little interest in coming to the party, seemed quite taken aback by Sillery’s apparent familiarity with his circumstances.

‘And your father?’ said Sillery, grinning, as if in spite of himself, under his huge moustache.

‘Pretty well.’

‘You were staying with him in Kenya?’

‘For a few months.’

‘The climate suits him all right?’

‘I think so.’

‘That height above sea-level is hard on the blood-pressure,’
Sillery said; ‘but your father is unexpectedly strong in spite of his light build. Does that shrapnel wound of his ever give trouble?’

‘He feels it in thundery weather.’

‘He must take care of it,’ said Sillery. ‘Or he will find himself on his back for a time, as he did after that spill on the Cresta. Has he run across Dicky Umfraville yet?’

‘They see a good deal of each other.’

‘Well, well,’ said Sillery. ‘He must take care about that, too. But I must attend to my other guests, and not talk all the time about old friends.’

I had the impression that Sillery regarded Stringham’s father as a falling market, so far as business was concerned; and, although he did not mention Buster, he was evidently far more interested in Mrs. Foxe’s household than that of her former husband. However, the room was now filling up, and Sillery began introducing some of the new arrivals to each other and to Stringham and myself. There was a sad Finn called—as nearly as I could catch—Vaalkiipaa: Honthorst, an American Rhodes Scholar, of millionaire stock on both sides of his family: one of Sillery’s pupils, a small nervous young man who never spoke, addressed as ‘Paul’, whose surname I did not discover: and Mark Members, of some standing among the freshmen of my year, on account of a poem published in
Public School Verse
and favourably noticed by Edmund Gosse. Up to that afternoon I had only seen Members hurrying about the streets, shaking from his round, somewhat pasty face a brownish, uneven fringe that grew low on his forehead and made him look rather like a rag doll, or marionette: an air augmented by brown eyes like beads, and a sprinkling of freckles. His tie, a broad, loose knot, left the collar of his shirt a little open. I admired this lack of self-consciousness regarding what I then—rather priggishly—looked on as
eccentricity of dress. He appeared to have known Sillery all his life, calling him ‘Sillers’, a form of address which, in spite of several tea-parties attended, I had not yet summoned courage to employ. The American, Honthorst’s, hair was almost as uncontrolled as that of Members. It stood up on the top of his head like the comb, or crest, of a hoopoe, or cassowary; this bird-like appearance being increased by a long, bare neck, ending in a white collar cut drastically low. Honthorst had a good-natured, dazed countenance, and it was hard to know what to say to him. Vaalkiipaa was older than the rest of the undergraduates present. He had a round, sallow face with high cheek-bones, and, although anxious to be agreeable, he could not understand why he was not allowed to talk about his work, a subject always vetoed by Sillery.

Conversation was now mostly between Sillery and Members; with the awkward long silences which always characterised the teas. During one of these pauses, Sillery, pottering about the room with the plate of rock-buns, remarked : ‘There is a freshman named Quiggin who said he would take a dish of tea with me this afternoon. He comes from a modest home, and is, I think, a little sensitive about it, so I hope you will all be specially understanding with him. He is at one of the smaller colleges—I cannot for the moment remember which—and he has collected unto himself sundry scholarships and exhibitions, which is—I think you will all agree—much to his credit.’

This was a fairly typical thumb-nail sketch of the kind commonly dispensed by Sillery, in anticipation of an introduction: true as far as it went, though giving little or no clue to the real Quiggin: even less to the reason why he had been asked to tea. Indeed, at that period, I did not even grasp that there was always a reason for Sillery’s invitations, though the cause might be merely to give opportunity
for preliminary investigation: sometimes not worth a follow-up.

No one, of course, made any comment after this speech about Quiggin, because there was really no suitable comment to make. The mention of scholarships once more started off Vaalkiipaa on the subject of his difficulties in obtaining useful instruction from attendance at lectures; while Honthorst, almost equally anxious to discuss educational matters in a serious manner, joined in on the question of gaps in the college library and—as he alleged—out-of-date methods of indexing. Honthorst persisted in addressing Sillery as ‘sir’, in spite of repeated requests from his host that he should discard this solecism. Sillery was deftly circumventing combined Finnish-American attack, by steering the conversation toward New England gossip by way of hunting in Maine—while at the same time extracting from Vaalkiipaa apparently unpalatable facts about the anti-Swedish movement in Finland—when Quiggin himself arrived: making his presence known by flinging open the door suddenly to its fullest extent, so that it banged against one of the bookcases, knocking over a photograph in a silver frame of three young men in top-hats standing in a row, arm-in-arm.

‘Come in,’ said Sillery, picking up the picture, and setting it back in its place. ‘Come in, Quiggin. Don’t be shy. We shan’t eat you. This is Liberty Hall. Let me introduce you to some of my young friends. Here is Mr. Cheston Honthorst, who has travelled all the way from America to be a member of my college: and this is Mr. Jenkins, reading history like yourself: and Mr. Stringham, who has been to East Africa, though his home is that beautiful house, Glimber: and Mr. Vaalkiipaa—rather a difficult name, which we shall soon find that we have all got so used to that we shan’t be able to understand how we ever found
it difficult—and Paul, here, you probably know from Brightman’s lectures, which he tells me he loyally attends just as you do; and I nearly forgot Mr. Mark Members, whose name will be familiar to you if you like modern verse—and I am sure you do—so make a place on the sofa, Mark, and Quiggin can sit next to you.’

At first sight, Quiggin seemed to be everything suggested by Sillery’s description. He looked older than the rest of us: older, even, than Vaalkiipaa. Squat, and already going bald, his high forehead gave him the profile of a professor in a comic paper. His neck was encircled with a starched and grubby collar, his trousers kept up by a belt which he constantly adjusted. For the first time since coming up I felt that I was at last getting into touch with the submerged element of the university, which, I had sometimes suspected, might have more to offer than was to be found in conventional undergraduate circles. Mark Members was evidently impressed by a similar—though in his case unsympathetic—sense of something unusual so far as Quiggin was concerned; because he drew away his legs, hitherto stretched the length of the sofa, and brought his knees right up to his chin, clasping his hands round them in the position shown in a picture (that used to hang in the nursery of a furnished house we had once inhabited at Colchester) called The Boyhood of Raleigh; while he regarded Quiggin with misgiving.

‘Couldn’t find the way up here for a long time,’ said Quiggin.

He sat down on the sofa, and, speaking in a small, hard voice with a North Country inflexion, addressed himself to Members: seeming to be neither embarrassed by the company, nor by Sillery’s sledge-hammer phrases, aimed, supposedly, at putting him at his ease. He went on: ‘It’s difficult when you’re new to a place. I’ve been suffering
a bit here’—indicating his left ear which was stuffed with yellowish cotton-wool—’so that I may not catch all you say too clearly.’

Members offered the ghost of a smile; but there could be no doubt of his uneasiness, as he tried to catch Sillery’s eye. However, Sillery, determined that his eye was not to be caught by Members, said: ‘The first year is a great period of discovery—and of self-discovery, too. What do you say, Vaalkiipaa? Can you find your way about yet?”

‘I make progress,’ said Vaalkiipaa, unsmiling: to whom it was perhaps not clear whether Sillery’s question referred to discovery in the topographical sense or the more intimate interior examination with which Sillery had linked it. There was a silence, at the end of which Members put in, rather at random: ‘Sillers, it is too clever of you to buy a suit the same colour as your loose covers.’

Quiggin sat sourly on the extreme edge of the sofa, glancing round the room like a fierce little animal, trapped by naturalists. He had accepted a rock-bun from Sillery, and for some minutes this occupied most of his attention. Honthorst said: ‘They tell me the prospects for the college boat are pretty good, Professor Sillery.’

‘Good,’ said Sillery, making a deprecatory gesture in our direction to suggest his own unworthiness of this style of address. ‘Good. Very good.’

He said this with emphasis, though without in any way committing his opinion on the subject of current aquatics. It was evident that at present Quiggin was the guest who chiefly interested him. Stringham he must have regarded as already in his power because, although he smiled towards him in a friendly manner from time to time, he made no further effort to talk to him individually. Quiggin finished his rock-bun, closely watched by Sillery, picked some crumbs from his trousers, and from the carpet round him:
afterwards throwing these carefully into the grate. Just as Quiggin had dealt with the last crumb, Members rose suddenly from the sofa and cast himself, with a startling bump, almost full length on the floor in front of the fireplace: exchanging in this manner his Boyhood-of-Raleigh posture for that of the Dying Gladiator. Sillery, whose back was turned, started violently, and Members pleaded: ‘You don’t mind, Sillers? I always lie on the floor.’

‘I like my guests to feel at home, Mark,’ said Sillery, recovering himself immediately, and playfully pinching the nape of Members’s neck between his finger and thumb, so that Members hunched his shoulders and squeaked shrilly. ‘And you, Quiggin, are you happy?’ Sillery asked.

Quiggin shook his head at the rock-buns, held out towards him once more; and, apparently taking the question to have a more general application than as a mere enquiry as to whether or not he wanted another cup of tea, or was comfortable sitting, as he was, at the springless end of the sofa, said in reply: ‘No, I’m not.’

Sillery was enchanted with this answer.

‘Not happy?’ he said, as if he could not believe his ears.

‘Never seem to get enough peace to get any work done,’ said Quiggin. ‘Always somebody or other butting in.’

Sillery beamed, proffering the plate once more round the room, though without success. Quiggin, as if something had been released within him, now began to enlarge on the matter of his own exasperation. He said: ‘All anyone here seems interested in is in messing about with some game or other, or joining some society or club, or sitting up all night drinking too much. I thought people came to the university to study, not to booze and gas all the time.’

‘Very good, Quiggin, very good,’ said Sillery. ‘You find we all fall woefully short of your own exacting standards—formed, no doubt, in a more austere tradition.’

He smiled and rubbed his hands, entranced. It even seemed that he might have been waiting for some such outburst on Quiggin’s part: and Quiggin himself somehow gave the air of having made the same speech on other occasions.

‘What an extraordinary person,’ said Members, under his breath, a remark probably audible only to myself, owing to the fact that the extreme lowness of the armchair in which I was sitting brought my ear almost level with Members’s mouth, as he rested with his elbow on the floor. Sillery said: ‘What do you think, Mark? Do you find that we are too frivolous?’

Members began to say: ‘My dear Sillers ‘ but, before he could speak the phrase, Sillery cut him short by adding: ‘I thought you might be in agreement with Quiggin as your homes are so close, Mark.’

After he had said this, Sillery stood back a bit, as if to watch the effect of his words, still holding the plate of rock-buns in his hand. If he had hoped to strike dismay into the hearts of his listeners, he could hardly have expected a more successful result so far as Quiggin and Members were concerned. Members, thoroughly put out, went pink in the face; Quiggin’s expression became distinctly sourer than before, though he did not change colour. ‘I had a suspicion that neither of you was aware of this,’ said Sillery. ‘But you must live
practically
in the same street.’

He nodded his head several times, and changed the subject; or, at least, varied it by asking if I had ever read
Jude the Obscure.
I realised, without achieving any true comprehension of what Sillery was about, that the object of revealing publicly that Members and Quiggin lived close to each other during the vacation was intended in some manner to bring both to heel: in any case I did not know enough of either at the time to appreciate that each
might prefer that any details regarding his home life should be doled out by himself alone.

Sillery abandoned the subject after this demonstration of strength on his part, so that the rest of his guests were left in ignorance even of the name of the town Members and Quiggin inhabited. The American and the Finn slipped away soon after this, on the plea that they must work; in spite of protests from Sillery that no one could, or should, work on Sunday evening. As they were leaving, another visitor could be heard coming up the stairs. He must have stood aside for them to pass him, because a moment later, speaking in a resonant, musical voice, like an actor’s or practised after-dinner speaker’s, he said, as he came through the door: ‘Hullo, Sillers, I hoped I might catch you at home.’