第29章 THE FOURTH(2)

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to the light of day.Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion.Ican still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative talks.I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne.The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and deep.He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.

Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale.We sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless-looking pipes,--there was a transient fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible.Our little excesses with liquor were due far more to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife-edges of life.Hatherleigh was a good Englishman of the premature type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one evening--Heaven knows how we got to it--" Look here, you know, it's all Rot, this Shutting Up about Women.We OUGHT to talk about them.

What are we going to do about them? It's got to come.We're all festering inside about it.Let's out with it.There's too much Decency altogether about this Infernal University!"We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency."Modesty and Decency," said Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices.The Jews brought them to Europe.They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield.

And all that sort of thing."

Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually wildly inaccurate, and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic of those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town spinster in his regard for respectability.But his case was too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with all four long fingers flat together, carried the point against him.He quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries of Thibet.

"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and tolerating attitude."I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity," he admitted generously."What I object to is this spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air--" oh, a confounded buttered slide of sentiment, to guide us.I tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.I'm twenty-two.Things might happen to me anywhen.You men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.

You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists....I mean to know what I'm doing."He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own.But one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed.I am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was developed.It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to other people's.

"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones; "that's what a servant says.His mind even is broken in to run between fences, and he admits it.WE'VE got to he able to think of anything.And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's saying.Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us.

If we see fit, that is."

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.