AT THIS POINT I shall interrupt my account of my
conversation with Victor on his abortive wedding day to tell, mainly in
my own words, about my relations with him at Oxford. During the rest of the term I saw a good deal of him. We made
expeditions on Cumnor Hill. We punted on the Cher. We sat up late in my
room or his, talking about everything under the sun, and far beyond it. The set with whom Victor normally consorted, the bloods and their
hangers-on, found his sudden interest in a colourless nobody from a
secondary school quite inexplicable, and ridiculous. It was assumed
that the big fair athlete had conceived a more than platonic friendship
for the small dark bookworm. I myself was as puzzled as anyone by
Victor's interest in me, and still more puzzled by his violent thirst
for knowledge. It was all so inconsistent with everything that I had
known of him before. On the very few occasions when our ways had,
crossed he had overawed me with that "self-satisfied air of effortless
superiority" which was supposed to be characteristic of our college.
And though later I was to learn from the awakened Victor that this
imposing demeanour of his was just a carefully cultivated affectation
concealing a bewildered and morally timid self, in those early days it
Impressed me; and at the same time exasperated me against myself for
being cowed by an assurance which I vaguely felt to be meretricious.
But on that memorable evening, when we first talked seriously together,
Victor's manner suggested an unselfconscious modesty. In the subsequent
weeks of our increasingly close friendship I was often put to shame by
the intellectual humility that accompanied even his most penetrating
remarks. I set out to be his mentor in his new-found interests, but to
my chagrin I found that in many ways it was he that was the leader in
our mental partnership. Far from being merely the superficially clever
but unoriginal mind that I had supposed him to be, he soared far beyond
me in sheer imaginative power; and this in spite of the fact that at
the outset he was ludicrously ignorant of the spheres of knowledge that
seemed to me most important. Previously I had written him off as one of
those glib intelligences that could, indeed, easily amass enough of
Greek and Latin literature to secure a First in Honour Mods, but had
neither the curiosity nor the power of vision to explore the living,
growing tissue of human culture. Not only so, but he had always seemed
a thoroughly hide- bound and insensitive personality. Though in his own
set he had a reputation for shrewd character-judgment, it had always
seemed to me that he had merely a certain slickness in docketing his
acquaintances according to their obvious failings, often ticking them
off with some Latin or Greek quotation. And generally the
classification which he adopted implied that there was one correct
type, and that all others were more or less ridiculous aberrations. Of
course, the correct type was the ideal of complacent gentility which he
and his set embodied, and to which the rest of us, in spite of our
better judgment, vainly aspired. Never, so far as I know, had Victor
shown any sign of realizing any human being as a living and unique
person. Never did he greet any sincere expression of anyone's authentic
personality otherwise than with derision or an uncomprehending and
insolent stare. Such was the James Victor Cadogan-Smith that I had known," from afar
and had apparently so shockingly misjudged. For now, after the invasion
of my room, and during the following few months, I came into contact
with a mind that extended sensitive antennae toward every acquaintance,
and seemed magically aware of the other's ever-changing moods. For my
new friend was earnestly, constantly, almost feverishly, absorbed in
exploring every aspect of experience, and above all every aspect of
human nature and human society. His interest in myself, of course, was largely due to my
comparatively wide knowledge of fields which he had formerly ignored.
For, though officially I was reading history, I made time for a great
deal of general reading, and my interest had led me into regions that
were in those days little explored by Oxford undergraduates. Not only
was I an ardent admirer of the early Wells; I was also reading Freud
with more enthusiasm than judgment. The advancing study of heredity
also fascinated me. In philosophy and social thought Bertrand Russell
was opening many new windows for me. Karl Marx, too, I had discovered;
and his strictly sociological attitude I counterbalanced with a
half-guilty addiction to popular astronomy. These fields were all apparently new to Victor. Under my guidance he
entered them with a childlike zest, a power of assimilation which I
envied, and a critical acumen which I could not always at the time
appreciate. Again and again I dismissed as unimportant some suggestion
of his which, years afterwards, turned out to be sound. The case of
Freud was specially significant. Victor apparently felt none of the
horror and fascination with which most new readers of the great pioneer
greeted his theory of sex and of unconscious motivation. He was merely
intrigued, and demurely amused at the general uproar. On the other hand
he never plunged into unquestioning partizanship, as I myself had done.
He seemed to leap at once to the more detached and balanced attitude
which most of us were to arrive at twenty or twenty-five years later. Even in theoretical matters, then, where I was supposed to be the
leader, Victor often went ahead of me, but in the sphere of personal
contacts his leadership was unmistakable. His "feminine intuition", as
I called it, expressed itself sometimes in devastating but never
vindictive comments on his own friends and mine, and in sudden probings
into my own dark heart. His exposures were often painful, but somehow I
could never seriously resent them. His uncanny awareness of my
unacknowledged motives often stung me to indignant denial; but a minute
later, or a day or a week, or in some cases not till middle age, I had
to admit to myself that he was right. The entirely unself-righteous way
in which he delivered these judgments was disarming. Once when he had
been telling me of a tennis victory, and I had duly congratulated him,
he looked silently at me, grinned broadly, punched me amiably in the
chest, and said, "Damn it! You're grudging me my poor little triumph.
You're wishing I had been beaten. Just as I wished you hadn't won that
essay prize. Or rather, a sneaking spiteful bit of me did." His power of imaginative insight and sympathy varied a good deal
from day to day. Sometimes I found with relief that he had missed (or
had not troubled to notice) some ungenerous impulse of mine. On the
other hand there were occasions when, having scrutinized me steadily
for a while, he would break in on some pronouncement of mine with, "No,
no! You're not really feeling that way about it. You're merely feeling
you ought to feel that way." It was this heightened personal consciousness that brought me so
greatly into Victor's debt. For under his influence I was gradually
forced to become aware of depth beyond depth of mental activity.
Priding myself on my honesty and self- criticism, I discovered that I
had all along been deceiving myself. As a good Freudian I accepted the
theory of unconscious motivation, but only in the abstract, not in
detailed application to myself. Now, without any special technique of
analysis, Victor made me aware that, for instance, under my noble
passion for truth lurked an impulse to impute dishonesty to others.
Under my social consciousness and my revolutionary zeal lay a purely
vindictive lust to see the "bloods" discomfited. I became increasingly dependent on Victor's psychological insight,
on his intuitive power of analysing and cleansing the psyche; a power
far more effective than my own ill-digested psycho-analytical precepts.
I shall have more to say on this matter, but for the moment I merely
want to record that, if I was of any service to Victor in those early
days, he was far more helpful to me. He became my father confessor, but
without any assumption of spiritual superiority. The relationship was
always a man-to-man relationship, and nearly always tinged with humour.
Moreover, nine times out of ten it was by the example of his own
self-analysis that he led me to discover my own hidden depths. And
toward the primitive, submerged denizens of his own mind he felt no
shame but merely an amused interest. He knew that their antics could
never seriously disturb him, so long as he was in his awakened state;
and so he could watch them with scientific detachment. Friendly toward
the archaic fauna of his own mind, he was equally friendly toward the
more contemptible creatures that he fished up into the light from my
mind's turgid depths. And because he could regard them with such
composure, I myself grew able to face them without either horror or
inverted pride; and with some hope of disciplining them. In one rather surprising respect Victor seemed to be my inferior. He
had a reputation for dash and pluck, both with the gloves and on the
rugger field; yet I found him childishly nervous at the prospect of
physical pain, and shattered by its actual presence. The task of taking
a splinter out of his hand was too much for him to face without the
stimulus of a spectator's ridicule; while the distress caused by the
splinter itself seemed to paralyse his mind. When I laughed over the
contrast of his present cowardice and his reputed hardihood, he let
slip a remark to which at the time I paid little attention, but on his
wedding day it became luminous. "Everything I nowadays becomes so
unendurably vivid." Not until long afterwards, in fact on his wedding
day, when he made his lengthy confession to me, did I learn that
Victor's awakened consciousness had two distinct phases, the one less,
the other more developed. In both there was that intensification of the
sensory life; but while in the commoner and less fully awakened phase
hyperaesthesia was an uncontrollable and devastating thing, in the
rarer and still more lucid state he had a strange power of regarding
the electric storm of his sensations (and indeed his whole intensified
passional life) with serene detachment, as though through the eyes of
some all-seeing all-feeling but utterly imperturbable deity. But in our
undergraduate days he never reached this height, and so he often laid
himself open to my friendly ridicule of his fastidiousness and his I
unmanly timidity. Friendly? On one occasion he retorted, smiling
through his distress, "Vindictive blighter! Under your taunting, of
course, there's your real kindliness, but under that again, you devil,
you're licking your lips." For the rest of the term, and most of the next one, our friendship
developed, though spasmodically. And during that period Victor himself,
the awakened Victor, developed rapidly. Like a plant retarded by a cold
spring, and then suddenly crowding forth all its leaves and flowers,
his mind burgeoned with experience. His official studies suffered, but
he ate his way through the libraries, seizing upon everything that
promised light on his central problem, which was the problem of us all,
the problem of man and the universe. The rest, no matter how reputable,
he ignored, as a caterpillar ignores all but its own distinctive food.
In this feverish pursuit of wisdom (as he told me long afterwards on
his wedding day) he was goaded constantly by the knowledge that "death"
might seize him any day, the death of his awakened self into "that
somnambulent and loathsome snob". He had one great advantage over the rest of us, namely that in the
wakened state he seldom needed more than two or three hours of sleep,
with an occasional indulgence to the extent of five. But it was
necessary for him to lie in bed for six or seven hours or so every
night to rest his body. All these unsleeping hours were therefore spent
in reading, or in "getting his thoughts in order". While the rest of us
were sunk in the archaic vegetative life, he would lie in bed
methodically going through his memories and re-assessing them. Vast
tracts of experience which the sleep-walker had allowed to slip into
oblivion were now available to him. Memories that were formerly the
vaguest and most illusive wraiths now presented themselves almost with
the detail of the original event. All this wealth of personal
experience had to be regarded afresh, from the point of view of the
awakened Victor. Its inner essence, untasted by the sleep-walker, had
to be pressed from it and assimilated. All his nights, I said, were spent in this way; but no, for besides
book-learning and self-knowledge he needed other kinds of experience,
of which I must tell. Freeing himself in a few weeks from all the inhibitions of his set,
his social class, and the historical moment, he seemed in a manner to
have rushed headlong by sheer imaginative power through much of the
cultural evolution which was to occupy his fellows for some twenty
years. Starting as a respectable Tory Christian who accepted without
question the moral code that had been imposed on him by his Victorian
parents, he now passed at a gallop through a kind of Liberal
Nonconformity, and on through Marxian Communism and Atheism, and before
he lapsed solidly back into the " sleep-walker " state he was already
groping beyond these. Thus in the second and third weeks of our
friendship he was affirming that, though the Christian doctrines were
sheer myth, he recognized in the universe "a power making for
righteousness". And though his eyes were opened to the hideous facts of
social injustice, and he was already taking on "social work" in a boys'
club, he still believed that the "great change" would come through the
leadership of a morally awakened middle class. Similarly, though
intellectually he recognized the wrong-headedness of nineteenth-century
sexual prudery, he was still emotionally bound up with it. But already
by the end of that term he was "breathing the cold exhilarating air of
atheism", seeking how best to devote his life to work for "the coming
proletarian revolution", and deliberately spurning the sexual
conventions to which his class paid lip-service even while it violated
them in actual conduct. But later in his life, as I shall tell, he outgrew all these
attitudes, which he came to regard as adolescent. During his last term at Oxford, and the second term of our
friendship, he must have pursued his sexual experiments very
thoroughly, for he was seldom available in the evenings; and though he
was reticent about his adventures, I know that he spent many nights
out, stealing back into college in the early morning by a climber's
route, up a drain-pipe and along a cornice. At the time he told me nothing of his amatory life. I remember
noting, in his manner, when he must have been still fresh to them, a
new complacency, even defiance."The bloods," he once said, "make a
great song about their dashing amours, but nearly always they're
mythical. Those who do it, hold their tongues; those who daren't,
brag." On another occasion he said, "To talk against the taboos
is merely to stand shivering on the springboard. It's the act that
counts." A few weeks later I became aware that Victor's mood had
changed. Exhilaration had given place to despond, and an irritability
which he had not hitherto shown. And he seemed dissatisfied with many
of the ideas that we had recently agreed upon. He was already beginning
to poke fun at our confident atheism and to express doubts about the
all-importance of economic determinism. This shocked me, for at that
time I was coming increasingly under the influence of Marx, priding
myself on my lonely vision; for few undergraduates had even heard of
the prophet of Communism. I was shocked, too, by Victor's new sense
that Freud's gospel, also, was somehow insufficient. As a good Marxist,
I ought not to have minded this; but I had not yet reached the stage of
pushing either of my new faiths to the exclusion of the other. Victor's doubts about Freud were not merely intellectual. While he
had often charged the great Viennese with a non sequitur in his
arguments, and had laughingly forgiven him, now he was more radically
critical. One evening (he was becoming more available in the evenings),
when we were deep in one of our usual discussions, smoking our pipes in
the arm- chairs before my fire, he made a long and disillusioned
confession. At first I put his gloominess down to mere physical
lassitude after his spell of concentrated debauchery. But it turned out
to be far more than the expression of a passing mood. With my usual
meticulous industry I jotted down all I could remember of Victor's
confession as soon as he had left me. Using those notes some
thirty-five years later, I must do my best to reconstruct his actual
words. We had been discussing the importance of instinct, if I remember
rightly. Victor charged me with overestimating it. He rose from his
chair and walked about the room, like a caged lion. "It's all very
well," he said, "but if you had lived as I have lived in the last few
weeks you'd probably feel as I do. You probably know that I have
been-doing a bit of practical research in sex. Well, at first it was
magnificently refreshing to be free of the taboos. And the sense of
being animal-to-animal with a woman at last was somehow spiritually
fulfilling; though also, in my first experiment, hellishly torturing,
because we neither of us knew how to adapt to the other. We hadn't the
technique. After a few nights got her rhythm, so to speak, and things
went better. But presently I had to try another girl, and then Number
One cut up rough about it. She had sworn she wouldn't mind, because
there was no question of our being 'in love'; but I sensed that as a
matter of fact she was falling for me pretty thoroughly, which was one
reason why I tried Number Two. Number One was so terribly upset about
it that I felt perfectly bloody, because- well, in spite of Freud and
all that, just couldn't help feeling that I had messed up something
sacred. That in itself was a revelation. Freud seemed pretty foolish to
me then. As for her- well she'll get over it, of course, but with a
twist in her that need not have been there. O God! I feel foul about it
even now. And what could I do to mend matters but clear out? Which
seemed like running away. Well, the harm had been done, so I went on
with my research, more cautiously." Here Victor interrupted himself to
turn on me with an unusual sharpness, even contempt. "For God's sake,'"
he said "don't sit there oozing self-righteousness at me, and fairly
stinking of hypocrisy!" I had said nothing, and I was not consciously
feeling self-righteous; and if I was a hypocrite, I had deceived
myself. But I had been feeling a curiously violent distaste for
Victor's sexual adventures. And though I had carefully maintained a
façade of sympathetic interest, Victor's antennae had reached
behind it. "You accept Freud in theory," he said, "but when I set about
testing the theory in action you go emotionally Victorian." I could
only protest that, whatever tricks my old emotional habits might play
me, I was fully emancipated. Victor continued his story. "My Number Two," he said, "was much older. She helped I me a lot.
She had style, and she taught me style, too. Each of us was a musical
instrument for the other to play on in the sex duet. It was exquisite
for a time, and I'll never forget her. But presently we began to know
one another better mentally. And like so many artists she had
practically nothing in her mind but her art, namely, love-making. At
first I didn't care. She did that so superlatively well, with touch and
voice and looks, that for a whole week I was in a sort of ecstasy. What
a thing touch can be, ranging from zephyrs to high-tension flashes! And tone of voice! Like fingers rippling over all the keys of one's
emotions! And looks! The faint, faint changes of lips and eyelids! But
I'm wandering. What I wanted to say was- well, I was beginning to slip
back toward the somnambulist again. One night I actually fell asleep
with her. Before that I had stayed wide awake when she slept, with my
mind careering over the universe. Falling asleep warned me. Then I
began to realize that I was not properly awake even by day. The cutting
edge of my mind was not what it had been. And images of her kept
interrupting my thought. Her voice sang in my ears all day. Remembering
the feel of her body next mine made me gasp-like getting into a very
hot bath. I longed for night. I realized I had got properly caught in
my own experiment, but I didn’t care. This was life, I said. But after
a few days I began to be frightened. Somehow our duet was no longer the
exquisite thing it had been, and yet I couldn't keep away from her. I
felt I wanted something more of her, and it was more than she
had in her to give. I told myself that though she was a superb
executant she was not a creative artist. But one night, instead of
falling asleep beside her, as I had recently done, I stayed fully
awake, puzzling desperately over the whole business. She was asleep. I
listened to her breathing. Presently I had a sort of revelation. Not a
mystical revelation, but a sudden flash of insight into the
implications of my own experience. You know those old puzzle pictures.
There's a forest of trees and undergrowth and rocks, and you're told to
'find the Red Indian'. You turn it about, this way and that; there's
nothing but what you saw before. Then suddenly there he is, larger than
life and clear as your own hand. Well, in the same way I suddenly saw a
new pattern in my recent experience, the essential pattern.
Suddenly I realized that I was most desperately lonely. I realized with
horrible clearness that, in spite of all the delight we had had
together, we were poles apart. No, a bad metaphor that; because 'poles' are poles of some I one
thing, and we simply didn't make one thing together, really. Of course
we made our little perfect duet of love- making, but we weren't
one underneath that. The thing didn't express any deeper
oneness. In a sort of vision I felt what that oneness should be. I
imagined myself lying in bed with the right person. The feel of
the whole thing would be different, and the love-making would be not
only perfect in technique but perfect in meaning.' It would be a bodily
union expressing unity of- well, spirit, or personality. I mean- each
mind contributing to the other on every level, and reaching to a sort
of stereoscopic vision, seeing the world from two points of view but
seeing it singly, and seeing it solid. And the wider apart the two
points of view, the better; provided they fuse together. Now God, if
there is one, must see the world from every possible point of view, and
yet see it singly. And human love (real love, I mean) must be like
that, though in a very small way. How do I know? Not having loved, how
do I know? I suppose I must have extrapolated from the experiences I
have had. For instance, from knowing you, you queer fish. Well, next
day I told all this to my Number Two, hoping we should somehow get
somewhere. She agreed, verbally; but she didn't really understand at
all. So the affair just fizzled out, leaving me richer in a way, but
horribly twisted, and desperately lonely; hungry for the thing I
couldn't have. And now I realized that the whole approach was wrong.
There's something in the old conventions after all; if they weren't so
rigid and prude, and so tangled up with sheer snobbery. I mean, people
keep the moral code of sex (or pretend to) not because they really see
that it's right, but because they're afraid of losing caste. And when
they come up against someone who has violated it, generally they are
not so much morally outraged (though they pretend to be) as vindictive
against someone who is no longer one of us" and can therefore be
persecuted, like a sick animal by the herd." I was impressed by Victor's change of attitude, but I could not
resist pointing out that Freud could give a very convincing account of
his dissatisfaction with his amours, simply in terms of repressed
infantile cravings. Unconsciously he was longing for his mother, and no
other woman could give him the peace and comfort that he demanded. Of
course, I admitted, it was not really quite as simple as that. The
psycho-analyst would be able to discover in him a vast mesh of past
experience leading inevitably to just the particular reaction which had
actually been manifested. Victor was silent for a moment. Then he surprised me with a
curiously hearty laugh. It reminded me of an occasion in my boyhood
when my father and I had been completely lost in mist on the hills, and
were expecting to spend the night out, drenched and in a cutting wind.
Dusk was already far advanced, and we believed ourselves to be many
miles from the farm where we were staying. At last we found ourselves
going down hill in pitch darkness, into a strange valley. The mist
cleared a little, and far away we saw a light. After floundering
through hedges and over walls we reached the light, and found it was
the lamp in our own sitting-room window. My father's laugh of relief
and triumph was echoed now in Victor's. "No!" he said, "Freud's sometimes too clever to see the truth. It's
like pre-Copernican astronomy. With enough epicycles you can make your
theory explain anything. But if you had been through my researches you
would see that Freud, brilliant and valuable as he is, has missed the
key to understanding the- well, the most developed, most conscious kind
of human relationships." I was not convinced. But now, near my sixtieth year, I see what he
meant. Henceforth, I believe, Victor refrained from continuing his sexual
researches. Instead he seemed to devote himself more earnestly to
research into society. Once more he was seldom available in the
evenings, because he was so frequently engaged at the. Boys' Club, or
at political meetings and on other activities, not merely of
undergraduate societies but in the town, and occasionally in London. I
soon came to realize that, though he was very ready to talk about most
of these activities, something was afoot about which he was being
secretive. He told me quite freely that with the aid of a small group
of working-class acquaintances of his he was seeking first-hand
experience of the conditions of the poorer sections of society. He
haunted pubs. He was taken into houses in back streets, not as an
officious social worker, but as a friend of a friend of the family. And
through his extraordinary gift of imaginative insight into the minds of
others he was able to discover the right approach, so as to establish a
genuinely friendly relation. "The class barrier," he once said, 'is
like one of those deep trenches that divide animals from spectators in
the newest sort of zoo. You can see each other quite clearly with
nothing in the way, and yet you can't possibly get at each other. At
least, in the human zoo you can make contact, but in one way
only. You must be doing something that puts you definitely on their
side, not on ours. And you must be able to convince someone on their
side (whom they know to be sound) that you really are doing it, that
you mean business. Once you have got yourself accepted by him, he can
get you accepted everywhere. You find yourself across the trench. You
get into that other world of theirs. Of course you're not really one of
them. You can't possibly be. But you'll be a welcome visitor instead of
a bloody intruder. And if you are quick in the uptake and a bit
imaginative, you'll learn a lot, oh, the hell of a lot! You'll learn
their language, the language of their minds, I mean. And you'll see'us'
looking mighty different from what we look like to ourselves." When I asked Victor what it was that he had been doing, that was a
passport to that other world, he looked at me hard and long, and said,
" I mustn't tell you." It soon became clear that he was giving more and more of his time
and his thought to his exploration of the "other world ", and that he
was over-straining himself. I saw very little of him. It was as though
he were in a desperate hurry to finish some task before it was too
late. Long afterwards, on his wedding day, he told me that at this time
he was expecting to ' die' at any minute, to slip back irrevocably into
his normal sluggish state. He never knew whether, if he allowed himself
to sleep at night, he would wake up in the morning as himself or the
hated other. He was therefore desperately anxious to make the fullest
possible use of his remaining days or hours, or minutes. Whether
through the soporific influence of his recent disappointing sexual
adventures, or through the actual strain of his new social exploration
itself, he was becoming subject to frequent lapses into a state of
drowsiness in which, though he was still (he said) at heart his
awakened self, his thoughts wandered and the desires and purposes of
the awakened self lost something of their power. In fact he was a
little bored; and yet outraged by his own boredom. Sometimes, too, he
caught himself secretly fingering and even relishing memories of his
own unregenerate past. Occasionally he even made cautious advances to
the more human of his former friends. For days at a time he would not come near me. If I sought him out, I
was generally received with a show of friendliness, but somehow
conversation flagged. None of the subjects which we usually discussed
with such zest seemed to have any significance for him. Often I
suspected that he had simply forgotten nearly everything connected with
our previous talk. I was shocked and bewildered by his lack of
intelligent grasp of the very problems which formerly his keen wit had
illuminated for me. Sometimes even superficial friendliness was allowed
to lapse. He would even speak with an affected "Oxford drawl", to shame
my North Country accent. In fact he would use every means short of
slamming the door in my face to make it clear that I was not wanted.
Yet, strangely, no sooner did he see that I was leaving than he blurted
out apologies, and excused himself on the plea of "feeling rotten", or
"having a thick head", or "being quite unfit for decent people to talk
to today". It was obvious that something queer had happened to him; but
I never suspected that the Victor who rebuffed me was a distinct
personality struggling to oust the Victor who was my friend. One incident is worth recording. I went round to Victor's rooms to
return a book which he had left with me on the previous evening. I
found to my surprise that he had with him two of his former friends,
Biglands, prominent as a speaker in Union debates, and Moulton, a minor
aristocrat. All three were a bit sozzled. They were sitting round the
table, from which the cloth had been removed, playing a childish game
with pellets of bread. A whole loaf had been disembowelled to provide
the material for the dozens of bread-pills with which the game was
being played. The three of them were frantically blowing pellets across
the smooth table at one another. I was so surprised that I stood in the
doorway silent. Victor's face, red from much blowing, was itself a
playing-board where conflicting emotions struggled for mastery.
Presently he said," Come in, Tomlinson, old man. We want a fourth
player. Have a drink, won't you?" The words were harmless; the drawling
voice was obviously meant to tell his companions that, though of course
he had to seem friendly to this wretched outsider with whom he had
somehow got himself entangled, he deplored the intrusion. "No, thanks,"
I said, and turned to go. With my hand on the door-knob, I heard
Victor's voice again, but this time its tone was altered. In a couple
of seconds, apparently, his temper had changed from bleak east wind to
bright warm sunlight. "Harry, don't go, please!" He had risen; and as I
turned, he took me gently by the arm, to lead me into the room. "I want
to make a public apology," he said, "for being offensive to you, Harry,
and for saying false and spiteful things about you before you came in."
Turning to the others, he added, "I'm sorry to be so inconsistent, but
before, I was- not myself." A glance passed between Biglands and
Moulton, signifying that Cadogan-Smith was evidently still crazy.
Biglands rose with a bored look. Moulton sat tight, and said, " Very
well, C.-S., give us some more beer and we'll have Tomlinson in the
game." Victor looked at the mess on the table for a moment. "No! " he
said. "If you don't mind, I think perhaps we had better stop." Victor
was looking extremely uncomfortable. He flashed an appeasing smile at
the couple. "I enjoyed the game," he said, "but now, in a new light, it
looks a bit silly. I mean, for people who are no longer kids. Oh, well!
Sorry, you two! Maybe we'll have a return match some time. But I really
must talk to Harry Tomlinson just now." He picked up a few pellets and
looked at them with an awkward little snigger. In a voice that
developed into a rapt recitative, he said, "People in America or
somewhere tilled the ground and sowed the seed. Rain, sun, wind. A
waving sea of corn to the horizon. People come with reaping machines, working from dawn to dark. Stooks
everywhere. Threshing machines. Grain in railway trucks, and in
elevators; poured into ships' holds. Wild Atlantic weather. The
look-out freezing and the stokers sweating. Docking the ship. (Ticklish
work. Like coaxing a shy horse.) More trains. Mill hands hard at it in
the mills. The corn becomes flour. Some reaches the baker who serves
this College. Dough. Lovely loaves. One of them came here. And now
look! God! I don't know what you fellows feel but I feel a swine. Well,
I started it." Biglands and Moulton had looked very uncomfortable
during this harangue. After it, Biglands merely said, " O Christ, I'm
going." His companion followed him. One morning the college was fluttered by a rumour that Cadogan-Smith
was in gaol. Apparently he had been mixed up in a fight with the police
over in Cowley. It was no ordinary undergraduate brawl. Victor was the
only undergraduate, and his associates were said to be extremely
undesirable characters who were known to be ring-leaders in recent
disturbances at the factory. Rumour had it that the police had finally
tracked the culprits down to a certain house in the working-class
district, that a scuffle had followed, and that C.-S. had given one of
.the constables a black eye. With great difficulty I managed to gain access to Victor while he
was in custody. It all sounded a pretty bad business, and probably he
would have to serve a term in gaol, so the least I could do was to see
if I could help him in any way. On my way to the police station I
wondered what mood I should find him in, whether exultant that he had
made a protest against social tyranny, or calm and self-contained. It
was a shock to find that he did not really want to see me as a friend
at all, though he was very ready to make use of me. It was a still
greater shock to find that he was thoroughly ashamed of his recent
escapade, and indignant with his accomplices for having enticed him
into it. He did not at the time divulge the fact that he had no memory
of the incident, and that all his scanty know- ledge of it was gleaned
from his gaolers. His behaviour to me was so bewilderingly inconsistent
with his past attitude that I found myself completely at a loss. 1 felt
an odd sort of vertigo. Needless to say, I was hurt and angry, but I
told myself that, of course, the whole affair must have put him to a
great strain, and that he had momentarily lost his bearings. He looked
at me from under the drooping eyelids of a camel, I thought, and with a
camel's sulky pout. Yes, and with that air of aristocratic and
offensive superiority which camels innocently wear. When I tried to
make contact by leading the talk round to subjects formerly interesting
to us both, he looked at me in a puzzled and hostile way, casting
occasional anxious glances at the warder who was supervising our
meeting. When I referred to recent events in which he had shared, he
seemed to have only a very confused recollection of them. I tried to
get him to talk about the incident that had landed him in prison, but
he kept on saying, "Hell, hell! I must have been tight or mad or
something." The only thing that seemed to interest him was the hope of
gaining his liberty as quickly as possible. He implored me to go round
to certain big-wigs who, he thought, might be able to use their
influence to interfere with the normal process of the law and set him
free. He was desperately anxious to persuade these big-wigs that he was
not really a reprobate but a young man with generous though misguided
impulses who had got himself into a scrape through sheer love of
adventure. Naturally I felt very uncomfortable about his attitude. I
was ready to pull wires for him if I could, but I wished he had not
asked me to do so. It was a relief when, after staring silently at me
for several seconds, he said, "No, Tomlinson, I'd rather you did
nothing. You would probably do more harm than good. I'll get Biglands
and Moulton on to the job." Having come to this decision he made it
clear that he had no further use for me, or interest in me. Our
conversation fell dead between us. I remember feeling that the real
Victor had simply disappeared, and that the creature in front of me was
a sort of animated husk with no real inner life of its own. It was as
though one had reached out to grasp the hand of a friend, and had
grasped nothing but air. With a vague shame and guilt, which I
irrationally felt on my own account, I left him. The Cadogan-Smith Incident caused a flare-up of the inveterate "town
and gown" feeling in the local press. Editors demanded that an example
should be made of this turbulent undergraduate. Let him stand his trial
with his accomplices and serve full sentence. But presently the tone of
the press began to change. It was said that C.-S. turned out to be a
decent young man who was mentally rather unbalanced and had had some
sort of mental storm through over-working. In this condition he had
been led astray by evil company. Severe punishment would probably turn
him permanently toward anti-social behaviour. Let him finish his
university career. Give him a chance to turn over a new leaf. We had all supposed that C.-S. would at the very least be sent down
from the university, but to our surprise he suddenly appeared once more
in residence, and was merely gated for the rest of the term. I made several efforts to open up friendly relations with Victor
again, but he resolutely rebuffed me. He had become once more the young
" blood " who had invaded my room at the beginning of the previous
term. We were in our last year, and by the end of our university career
we were practically strangers. Reading over this chapter, I feel that I have presented only one
side of Victor's character as he was during our undergraduate days. I
have been so concerned with what may be called his supernormal powers
that I have failed to show him as a real human being with
idiosyncrasies and weaknesses like the rest of us. He was no superman,
and no saint. Much in him seemed to be even a sheer reaction against
the conventional virtues of his own other self. For instance, the
somnolent Victor had always scorned sweets as inappropriate to the
mature men ' that undergraduates took themselves to be. But the awake
Victor made a point of being rather a pig about sweets. Indeed, on one
occasion he made himself sick by eating a large box of fudge at a
sitting. I was righteously indignant; but he, wiping his greenish face
and blowing his nose after this disgracefu1 incident, remarked with a
wan smile, "Harry, you're just an unimaginative prig. I despise you.
Damn it, it was worth it, if only to discover one's limitations. Some
day I shall do it again." The somnolent Victor was a very methodical and tidy creature; but
the awake Victor seemed incapable of keeping his possessions in their
right places. He was apt to drop things where he had last used them.
His rooms in college soon lost their former neatness, and became a
chaos of books, papers, clothes, cakes, sweets, pipes and all sorts of
queer oddities which he had picked up on our country walks. He had
become something of a jackdaw with an irrational itch to collect
attractive trifles. There were about a dozen large pieces of flint,
some of which he had laboriously chipped into arrow-heads, celts and
"leaf-blade" knives. Once, when he had bashed his own thumb by mistake,
he said, "This is the way to learn respect for our paleolithic
ancestors. Not for nothing did they have brains rather bigger than
ours." I noticed, by the way, that though his first efforts would
certainly have been a disgrace to the prehistoric craftsmen, he learned
rapidly, and in the end produced several presentable celts and one
really beautiful little translucent arrow-head, like an accurately cut
jewel. Of this he was unashamedly proud, carrying it about in his
pocket, and showing it to everyone likely to admire it. This exquisite
little object became one of his most treasured "toys". For Victor had a
thoroughly childish craving to finger small articles which he
invariably carried in his pocket for this purpose. In conversation, and
even during serious writing or reading, he would absent-mindedly play
with his arrow-head, or with one of the pebbles, acorns, crystals, and
so on, that had taken his fancy on our walks. Amongst his most valued
treasures were two heavy silver Ptolemaic Egyptian coins that he had
bought in an old junk shop. While talking, he would finger one of these
amply moulded pieces, or gaze intently at the detail of the profile or
coiffure. Yet his attention never seemed to wander from the subject of
conversation. In his rooms, all sorts of objects generally lay about on
table, desk, couch and chairs. Along with notebooks and works on
history and philosophy, were tobacco-pipes, queer old books of prints,
two small granite boulders (one grey and one pink), a number of bits of
wood that showed an attractive grain, a seventeenth- century silver
spoon, a fallow deer's antler (acquired from the Magdalen herd), and a
number of unframed pictures of young women who appealed to his rather
queer taste in feminine beauty. Strangely, he never seemed to have any difficulty in finding what he
wanted in this chaos. He could always go straight to the desired object
with the precision of a monkey finding its way among the chaos of
branches in the jungle. Another queer and often exasperating trait was this. In spite of his
remarkably coherent, integrated behaviour in all important matters, his
extravagantly keen zest in the life of the senses often led him to
sacrifice a seemingly major end to a seemingly trivial sensuous
experience. He would become so enthralled with a particularly good brew
of cider (not a popular drink in those days) that he would keep me
waiting for half an hour while he savoured every sip, with all the
seriousness of an expert wine-taster. Often our planned walk was
completely upset while he strayed about watching the flight of gulls or
swallows, or the hovering of a kestrel. Once, when this had led to our
missing a train and an important Union debate, I protested rather
violently. He rounded on me with scorn, declaring that if only I had
used my eyes and my wits properly I should have got far more out of
those birds than a "gas-bag politician" could ever give. Victor seemed to have a special feeling about birds, a combination
of primitive lust in the chase, scientific and aesthetic interest, and
something else, difficult to define, but in a way almost religious.
When an unfamiliar bird appeared, he would throw all his plans to the
winds to stalk and watch it. He made a careful study of bird-flight,
particularly in the case of gulls, swallows, hawks and other expert
fliers. He would often spend hours experimenting with little home-made
gliders, made of paper for indoor work, and of wood and oiled silk for
the windy crests of ridges. He was fascinated by the admirably
functional shapes of the master fliers among birds. Evolution, he used
to say, had moulded them to fit beautifully into the air-streams that
their speed created. He was fascinated not only by their perfection of
form and action in the air but also by their temperament, their
attitude to life. "Man", he once said, "concentrated on intelligence,
birds on artistry. And in a way all their art is sacred art." When I
protested, he laughed, and said, "Watch a gull cruising around. No
doubt he's in search of food, spying after titbits, but that is not
all. How he lives in the sheer skill of flight, like a skater! His
cruising is flight become a religious exercise, an ecstatic harmony
with the universe, only possible to creatures that have I perfected
their adaptation to the environment; quite impossible for man, that
half-made clumsy flutterer in a more difficult medium." I broke in with
the remark that a gull's cruising was no more religious than a woman's
cruising for bargains in a general store. He laughed again, and pointed
out that the gull had been fashioned by millions of years of life in
the air, and the woman had not been fashioned by general stores, or not
to the same extent. He said, "On a fine day, and with a reasonably full
belly, the gull's cruising is a sheer act of worship. Can't you feel
into it enough to recognize that? And think of all the rest of the
pure artistry of birds. Think of courtship, nest-building, and song. No
doubt the robin's song begins as sheer sexiness or sheer
defiance to his neighbours; but the immediate end is soon overlaid with
pure artistry, and worship. If you took more notice of birds, you old
stick-in-the-mud, you might be able to get inside them a bit and feel
how they feel" Another consequence of Victor's addiction for "living in the moment"
was one which, in spite of my vaunted emancipation from the
conventions, I regarded as reprehensible. Whenever he saw a girl that
strongly attracted him, he used to watch her with frank delight, and if
possible find some way of striking up a casual conversation with her.
Such conduct might pass unnoticed today, but when we were
undergraduates, before the First World War, it looked bad. Besides, it
was annoying to me because it often upset our plans. My expostulation
seldom availed to bring him to his senses. Nearly always he scornfully
insisted that it was sheer folly not to gather rosebuds while one
might. It must be admitted that these casual encounters were very
different from the minor flirtations of other young men. I cannot think
of a better way of describing Victor’s technique than by saying that,
in spite of his unconcealed admiration, he seemed rather to aim at
establishing a comradely relation than to invite dalliance. If the girl
reacted by putting up a veil of virgin modesty or, on the other hand,
by "leading him on", he would promptly turn away. He once told me that
he supposed what he really wanted of these brief encounters was to "add
to the picture-gallery of his memory", so that by contemplating these
treasures he might improve his sensitivity both to physical beauty and
to the beauty of personality. I remarked that his taste was very
different from mine, and that he seemed to fall for very queer-looking
girls. He replied with spirit, "Damn it, man, it's time you outgrew the
mere chocolate-box lovelies. They are too easy to appreciate. The
really enthralling girls are rare. That's why I have to pursue them a
bit, lest I should miss a treasure." In passing, perhaps I should
remind the reader that though the awake Victor had a rather odd taste
in feminine beauty, the somnolent Victor's taste was strictly orthodox.
Hence Edith. I sometimes felt that Victor's interest in strange girls
was a special case of his lively zoological interest. All through his
life Victor retained what I used to regard as a childish interest in
birds and all animals. Once he dragged me up to London to visit the
Zoo. I was soon as tired as a middle-aged uncle piloting a vigorous
young nephew around. Or rather Victor did the piloting, and I trailed
after him. I was really more interested in Victor's reactions than in
the beasts. Some cages he passed after half a minute's careful study,
but others enthralled him. He would stand perfectly still with an
expression in which scientific scrutiny, schoolboy delight and
sorrowful insight succeeded each other like moments of sunshine and
shade. In those days the "newest type of zoo" had not yet been adopted
in England. The creatures were kept in much more wretched conditions
than is now customary. They were all quite obviously bored prisoners,
and their despond affected Victor deeply. After a while, to my
embarrassment, he took to talking to the beasts, as a completely
unselfconscious child might do. But what he said was not childish.
Speaking quietly, and as to an equal, he would express diffident
compassion, apologizing for the unimaginative and ruthless conduct of
his own species toward other species. Onlookers sniggered at him; but
he turned to them with his wry smile that was half comic, half tragic,
and said, "Well, it's true, isn't it?" The onlookers ceased to snigger.
We came to a polar bear that was pacing ceaselessly behind its bars,
ignoring the spectators. As it turned at the end of its cage, it rubbed
its shoulders against the partition. This endlessly repeated action had
resulted in a patch of bare skin on each shoulder. Victor watched in
silence for some time; then he said, "You poor devil! It's a change
from the Arctic! You're cut out for ice and snow hunting, and look what
we do to you." Surprisingly, the bear came to a halt and faced him. It
sniffed at him through the bars and gave a rumbling whimper, for all
the world as though in some obscure way it recognized a friend. I mention this incident because it gave me a little shock at the
time, and because it fell in line with a number of other queer
encounters between Victor and dumb animals. The strange thing was that
they often seemed to notice him and like him even when he was not
attending to them. I have no plausible explanation to offer, but it is
a fact that animals took to Victor. Dogs, for instance, had a habit of
attaching themselves to him for companionship on a walk. Several times
when we sat down to rest in a field a dog arrived and settled itself
against him for no apparent reason. Once, when we were sitting talking in a field near a village, an
obviously verminous tike accosted him in this way and he gently threw
it off; but it kept on returning. "Go!" he cried, "Hop it! Va t'en!
Imshi!" He made fierce noises at it, and pretended to throw a
stone, but it merely wagged its tail. Then it calmly sat down against
him and began catching fleas. Victor jumped to his feet and said very
firmly, "Look here, brother! You have fleas and I haven't, so kindly
keep off." The animal put its head on one side and looked at him in a
puzzled genial way, again vaguely wagging its tail. Victor dropped on
one knee, took its head between his hands, looked into its eyes, and
said very solemnly."I know we're friends. I know mutual understanding
binds us eternally as comrades. I know you're horribly misunderstood at
home and you still retain a glorious faith in humanity in spite of
everything. But for reasons not apparent to you I suggest we love one
another at a distance." He then gently pushed the creature away and sat
down again beside me. The dog hesitated for a moment, then squatted
where it was, looking reproachfully at Victor. Presently it turned its
attention once more to its fleas. When we continued our walk, it came
with us for some distance, but after a while it wandered off on its own. I once asked Victor why dogs liked him. "God knows!" he said.
"Perhaps I smell right." Children also seemed to take a fancy to him. He never made advances
to them, but when they opened up relations with him, he responded in
his detached though friendly man-to- man way, and was at once taken
into partnership. He had little experience of children, but he seemed
to enter imaginatively into any child's point of view. When he was
drawn into a child's play, he behaved sometimes, of course, with humour
and mischief, but often with great seriousness, as though the game were
quite as important to him as to the child. For example, once we entered
a crowded London train, and a compartment in which a tired and
disheartened mother was trying to cope with a tired and cantankerous
little boy. It so happened that I sat next the woman, and Victor
opposite. We buried ourselves in our books. The ceaseless complaining
kept up by the child made it impossible for me to concentrate, but
Victor was soon wholly absorbed in his History of Socialism.
The child fidgeted and whined and yelled. Presently it fell silent,
gazing at Victor. Though I was next it, it took no notice of me. It
leaned forward from its mother's lap and banged Victor's knee. He
looked up, smiled, and continued reading. It grabbed at the pages; he
gently removed its fingers. The mother scolded the unruly infant, but
it continued to take an interest in the mysteriously attractive young
man sitting opposite. When other methods of approach had failed, the
little boy took the chocolate out of his own mouth and offered it to
Victor. The spectators laughed, but Victor said politely, "It's awfully
good of you but I'd rather you had it." Meanwhile he had closed
his book, and after fumbling in a pocket he produced (of all unlikely
things) the curb-chain of a horse's bridle. This treasure he had
acquired a few days earlier at a village saddler's. We had been passing
through the village, and he was attracted by the window full of
harness, curry-combs and horse-cloths. He insisted on entering the shop
in search of a new treasure, and presently he hit on the chain.
Evidently it had been in his pocket ever since. He now laid the six
inches of shining metal neatly on his knee, remarking, "Nice, isn't
it?" Then he picked it up and twisted it into a tight spiral, then
shook it out into its normal looseness and handed it to the child, who
took it and examined it with solemn eyes. Victor returned to his
reading. But presently the child, still holding the chain, reached
forward with both arms toward Victor, and said "Dadad ", to everyone's
amusement. Victor closed his book with a sigh and received the infant.
For half an hour he entertained his new friend with the contents of his
pockets, telling him a simple story about each article, and obviously
enjoying himself. I record these little incidents because they throw light on Victor's
character as a young man. But indeed throughout his life incidents of
this sort were apt to occur to the awake Victor. And even when he was
nearly sixty he still combined with his exceptionally adult nature many
childlike, or positively childish, traits. The toy habit remained with
him. Dogs and even horses continued to follow him about. And throughout
my acquaintance with him he was apt to allow immediate sensory
pleasures to upset relatively serious enterprises, and to be completely
unashamed of doing so. He once said, "No doubt man triumphed by taking
thought for the morrow, and he must learn to take thought even for a
very distant morrow, thousands of years ahead; but sometimes the
present's claim is more urgent than the future's. And if you never live
in the present moment, never let it soak right through you at every
pore, you never really live at all."3
BEGINNINGS OF OUR FRIENDSHIP
From 1908 to 1912