The Balliols (63 page)

“We shall of course raise your salary in proper proportion to the increased value of your services. And I can't say, my dear fellow, how glad I am, how glad we all are, to have you back. I hope that the next ten years are going to be the happiest and most prosperous in all our lives.”

He stretched out his arm and shook Smollet's hand very heartily.

It was in a contented and tranquil frame of mind that he walked that evening over the hill from Hampstead station. No searchlights swept across the sky. Their absence symbolized for him the tranquillity that throughout the entire world had taken the place of the last years' turmoil. There was every reason to believe that his prophecy to Smollett would be justified. The next ten years should be the happiest and most prosperous in all their lives, a business going well, semi-retirement for himself, politically an assured future. It would be many years before Europe could afford the folly of another war. His son at home again, his grandchildren growing up. Had anyone the right to ask more than that of life?

He was not the only one who was setting himself that question at that moment. Ruth, as she welcomed Victor back from the board-meeting into the cosy comfort of their first real home; Lucy, as she tucked up her children for the night before going to join her husband at the Casino Palace; Hugh, in his new flat, a fire blazing brightly, a cocktail shaker and two glasses on the lacquer table beside the wide low, many-cushioned divan, waiting for the bell ring that would open the door to who could tell what entrancing chapter of romance; Helen, in her bath, holding her toes above the surface, thinking “I'm eleven now. Two thirds of the way to being quite grown up.” They were all in their separate ways thinking “The ball's at my feet now.” Of them all Francis alone was viewing the future cautiously.

Back at Fernhurst, away from London where things were happening so fast that you could not tell what was happening, Francis was by no means certain that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. He had seen the war as Lucy, Ruth and Hugh had not seen it; as Helen had been too young and his father too old to see it; as one outside but still a part of it. His perceptions were acute, his mind logical. He had watched from the start down to the end that process of ignoble material self-seeking that drove into some form of pacifism most thinking men who spent the war in England. It was when they were at home, not when they were in the trenches, that soldiers were goaded into revolt by the manner in which the war was being run. The man who for reasons of health was unable to enlist in 1914, if he had a brain to use and used it, would have been by 1918 on the verge of militant pacifism.

Francis had had no chance of seeing what was fine and genuinely heroic in the war; he had seen on the other hand the smugness of the charity organizers; the cant about “the good the war was doing;” politicians and the press-kings boosting the war as though it were a kind of soup, as though it were a cure for all mortal ills, a social purge. He had heard the vindictiveness of the old men in their clubs; the dishonesty with which in every walk of civilian life interested persons tried to force through the measures that would profit them, on a plea of patriotism. He had seen the word “patriotism” exploited, till it was counterfeit currency. He knew how the war itself had been presented to the public in terms of glamour, not for the thing it was. There had been a conspiracy of silence. Those who had tried to speak the truth had been imprisoned. He felt that ordinary people had been tricked and cheated into accepting the war as something other than it was. He was by no means certain that peace, any more than war, would prove to be the commodity that had been advertised.

At Fernhurst there was the complete change of atmosphere. The hoisting of the new slogan “back to normal.” Morning P.T. was cancelled. Section drill before lunch became punishment drill.
There was only one parade a week. The elevens were allowed to wear badges on their blazers. The War Savings Certificates were exchanged for calf-bound testimonials. There was talk of reconstruction, of the work that lay ahead to make the country worthy of the men who had fallen for it. Three visiting preachers during the Lent term used the simile of the torch bearers. This generation must carry on the torch that its brothers and fathers had handed it. The simile provided some very powerful perorations.

“Yes, that's all very well,” thought Francis. “But our fathers and grandfathers ran the world so badly, that Hugh's generation had to salvage it, and my generation is going to have a very much less amusing life. It's all very well to talk about hanging the Kaiser and making Germany pay, but the people who are really responsible for the mess in which we find ourselves are the very people who are doing all this talking. They're the people who didn't know where we were going and ran the machine into a ditch. The machine's been dug out and put upon the road. But the same people are still steering it. And I'm by no means sure that the car's still roadworthy.” He was in a rebellious mood.

The opportunity for expressing his rebellion came.

In the following September the Fernhurst XV played its first match against a London club side since the war. To Rosslyn Hill went this distinction. The Hill side was captained by an old Fern-hurstian. He was a tall, imposing man, with a stiff upright bearing. He led the side, not exactly from the rear; but from whatever part of the field in which he happened to find himself he directed operations in a loud steady flow of commentary and criticism, that appeared to have the action of a magnet in drawing the game towards him. He never followed the ball; the ball, however, often happened to be in the spot where he also was. He then displayed astonishing agility until such time as the ball had been transferred to another section of the field. By the end of a not particularly high scoring game, he had personally accounted for two tries.

Francis sat next to him during tea. His name was Malcolm. He stated that he was thirty-two, and a subsequent investigation of the school register corroborated this statement. But Francis found it difficult even remembering his energy and eloquence upon the field to believe that he was under forty. He had not so much an old as a mature air. He wore an eyeglass, and a high stuck-up collar with a very wide opening. He had a stiff carriage, and he addressed his team in an avuncular manner as “my juniors.” He recounted at tea
a great many anecdotes of his own career at Fernhurst with skill and gusto.

The fifteen was considerably impressed. Back numbers of the Fernhurstian were searched for records of his achievements. But beyond a reference to the fact that he had left in 1906 and had been a corporal in the O.T.C., they could discover nothing. It was odd, they were agreed, that a fellow who was clearly so successful now should have made so little mark at school. There were some fellows, they supposed, who developed late. From his manner Francis imagined that he was a barrister.

His astonishment was consequently considerable when, searching Selfridge's tobacco department for a Christmas present for his father, he saw the captain of Rosslyn Hill, hatless, and beside a counter, explaining to a venerable and aristocratic prelate the merits of a cigarette box that played
Humoresque
when you pressed the catch. He recognized Francis with a lowered eyelid, and continued the explanations which concluded apparently in an order, since he handed the box over to a brown-coated salesman who was standing behind the counter. The authority of the gesture and the fact that whereas the salesmen were wearing brown holland coats, Malcolm was in an ordinary lounge suit, suggested to Francis that he occupied a position of some consequence.

The moment he was disengaged, Malcolm walked across to Francis with the same stately stride with which he had followed a receding scrum.

“You are surprised to see me here. Yes, I know: others are in your plight. And you have come to select a Christmas present for your father. Admirable. If you will follow me to the private sanctum where I interview my really important customers.…”

He led the way behind the glass counters, up a narrow winding iron stair, into a low wide room furnished with cabinets of cigars, a large desk, and a window looking on to the store from which Malcolm could watch the conduct of proceedings in his department. He pointed out a chair to Francis.

“Sit down. I always enjoy the surprise on my friends' faces when they find me here. They don't know what to say. They don't know whether it wouldn't be kinder of them not to recognize me. As though they'd met me in a dubious place in dubious company. Now tell me about the Alma Mater. I see that we beat Tonswick. A very stout performance.” He talked Fernhurst gossip as amply as he had in the school tuck-shop.

To Francis it was a very astonishing experience. He had known
that Selfridge's were making the experiment of taking public school boys into the store as salesmen. He had considered it a sound idea. But he had never imagined that anyone he knew would apply for such a post. It was very strange to find the captain of Rosslyn Hill A, an old Fernhurstian whom he had met and taken for a barrister, in charge of a tobacco department.

Malcolm eyed him with an urbane smile.

“Yes, I know. There's no need to ask me. I know what you're thinking. What is this very fine footballer doing in this emporium? Shall I tell you the story of my life? I will not. I will tell you this. A great many of us who never imagined before the war that they would have to do more work than was necessary to supplement an inherited income, found themselves after the war in the position of having to bustle if they were not going to spend their nights on the Embankment. Before the war I had a quarter share in a tobacco business. I had a great deal of spare time so I took the trouble to learn what the business was about. When the war was over and the King had no further reason to call upon my services, I said to myself, ‘Little Malcolm, what qualifications have you to put upon the market? What do you know, what can you do? Do you know anything, can you do anything?' I decided that the only thing that I knew anything about was the tobacco business, so here I am.”

It sounded simple, but there was more, a great deal more, that Francis was curious to know. Why, instead of taking up his quarter share in the private tobacco business, had he come here, for instance? That would have been more amusing, he would have thought.

“You mean I shouldn't have had to work behind a counter? I shouldn't have had to call people of what is called my own class, ‘Sir.' Yes, I'll admit I'd thought of that. But I don't believe in the future of the small, privately owned business. Before the war it was just able to provide the small addition to an income that the people who were responsible for it required. But the tendency now is all against the small dealer. We haven't got the American system of the Chain Store yet. But we're on our way there. The more you centralize, the more you produce a sound, standardized article, the more you can cut down overheads. ‘Little Malcolm,' I said to myself, ‘the future is with the big companies. You go where the future is.'”

It was the first time that such ideas had been presented to Francis. He pondered them. They seemed sound enough. All the same, it
was queer when you came to think of it that a man's parents should educate him expensively for ten years at a preparatory and at a public school, and at the end of it all his only marketable capacity was a familiarity with the workings of the tobacco trade, that he had acquired, subsequently, as a hobby. He suggested as much to Malcolm.

Malcolm shrugged his shoulders.

“It isn't queer when you reflect that the world for which I was trained at school is a world that exists no longer. In my day on a very small income a bachelor could lead a varied and comfortable life. He could do most things. If he had a few hundreds coming to him from land or consols, he needed only to look round for some very half-time occupation that would keep him employed and make some small addition to his private means. A man brought up as I was to the kindly world I expected to live in, didn't need commercial assets. To-day he does. He can't lead the same kind of life on a small income. Those few hundreds coming in from land and consols aren't more than about a few fivers. They buy about a tenth. And those half-time occupations don't exist. A man's either working or he isn't working. And if he is working, it's at a whole-time job. No, no, the world you are being trained for is very different from the one to which little Malcolm imagined he would devote his talents. It needs some adjustment to fit into it. But after all, at the end of it, here one is.”

And one might be in a worse place, in a considerably worse place, Francis thought as he waited at the corner of Orchard Street for a ‘bus back to Golders Green. He might consider himself lucky if he found himself in as good a place in ten years. For what was it that he was headed, after all? He was now in his last year at Fernhurst. In the following autumn he would go up to Oxford. If he worked at all hard he should get a second. If he worked really hard he might get a first. But after that? No definite plans had been made for him. It was assumed that if you went through the normal educational curriculum of your class, the future took care of itself; or arranged itself in terms of the position to which at the end of that curriculum you had graduated. But what were the prospects offered to the kind of graduation that he was likely to achieve? He had not the precise brain that would fit him for prominence in the fields of formal scholarship. Besides, he had taken things easily during the war years. There had been so many other things. You could not pursue wholeheartedly courses for which the world might hold no employment. He doubted whether he was likely to enter into
sufficiently effective competition with the best brains of his generation to pass high enough into the Civil Service to see the opening for swift promotion. For one of his talents, under pre-war conditions, a post in the Indian Civil would have been expected. But who wanted to go to India at a time like this, when within a decade for all one knew India would have been handed back to her own mismanagement; when the man on the spot was faced with problems that demanded prompt and ruthless action for which those at home would afterwards fail to back him up? You had to choose between the safety of the white residents and possible hardship to a few natives. You protected your own people and were reprimanded by Whitehall. Nobody but a fool would want to go to India now. And what else was there? There had been a time when public school men had had a monopoly of a certain kind of job. They had that monopoly no longer. Such soft jobs as were going were reserved, and rightly reserved, for ex-officers. And besides, it wasn't a soft job that he was looking for. He was ambitious. He wanted a scope for his ambition. “I wonder whether my father has any ideas about what's going to happen to me?”