Part 22 (1/2)
”In a crude sort of way. We're always talking about G.o.d at Oxford.”
”That must be splendid. I have to do it with myself, but I don't get any further.”
”Than what?”
”Than a tremendous conviction that there can't be one.”
”There isn't.”
”You've settled it?”
”Long ago.”
”I suppose,” said Freda, ”that people laugh at you, like they do at me.
I don't care. Margaret talks about the Unknowable and says I'm presumptuous. I hate the Unknowable: it seems so cowardly, somehow.”
”You're quite right,” decided Martin. ”The Unknowable is the limit.”
”But we mustn't agree about everything,” Freda put in: ”otherwise it will be frightfully dull.”
”Well, let's talk about Art,” he suggested. ”We're bound to quarrel then.”
And they did. It was astonis.h.i.+ng how soon lunchtime arrived.
Later on they talked about everything in the world. Martin knew that he had found what he wanted, a woman with an undergraduate's mind. In a way it was like talking to one of the Push, but yet there was all the difference in the world. Why there should be that difference he couldn't tell. But there it undeniably was. To meet men who could argue was good: to meet a woman who said the same sort of things was more than good. Freda walked with him on the moor on Tuesday, and he had the chance of helping her over bogs and chasms. On that evening she accepted a billiard lesson at his hands. Of these opportunities he made the most. May Williams had at least had an educational value.
These four days were magically sundered from the rest of life: he had succeeded, to his own great surprise, in forgetting Oxford altogether.
But the day of reckoning was at hand, and when Martin settled down in the train on Wednesday he fell at once from the heights to the depths.
To begin with, he was going back to Mods. Before the tumult of his mind flashed visions of texts marked with blue lines, texts which he had omitted to look up. He wondered whether he really knew about Ulysses' abominable boat and whether he remembered which words in the Greek meant dowels and trenails. And he was going back to Pink Roses.
The squalor of it! To-night he was to meet her and slink away somewhere. He couldn't, he simply couldn't! He had learned, rather he thought he had learned, what a conversation with a woman ought to be.
There could be no more whisperings with May. On reaching Oxford Martin sent a telegram: he was unavoidably prevented from seeing her. He felt that he ought to be angry with himself because it didn't hurt him to treat her like this: but his conscience failed to rise to the situation. Quite plainly he had done with May.
Mods in the actual presence afforded him eight days of consummate torture. It was all right for Rendell, who knew his work thoroughly, and Lawrence, who didn't know it at all. They could view their papers without concern, the one scribbling diligently, the other yawning complacently, guessing words, and tossing up with a penny when there seemed to be two equally probable meanings to a pa.s.sage for construe.
But for Martin every prepared paper was a thing of reminiscence and suggestion. He knew just enough to appreciate his own ignorance: as he stared at the pa.s.sages on which he had to comment he recognised them with maddening vagueness as a man who cannot put a name to a face he knows. Hauntingly they seemed to cry out at him: ”You saw me last January, but you don't know what the devil I'm about.” While Rendell used his knowledge and Lawrence his imagination, Martin sweated and racked his memory and got everything half right. His nerve went and he began, he thought, to make a mess of his composition. Afterwards he was left with a blur of sensations and images which included a large clock and a smiling invigilator, aching hands and nights of relentless preparation.
When it was all over he hurried down to Devons.h.i.+re, leaving Lawrence to forty-eight hours of continuous intoxication. Freda would still be there. But, to his fury, he discovered that she had gone to Paris with Margaret. He sulked obviously, and hated the whole world: life and letters had tended to leave his nerves raw and anything stung him.
Finally he went to join Rendell and Lawrence in Belgium, and there, with Memling and Bock and conversation, he forgot his woes. The exam results came to them at Rochefort, rich in grottoes, that notable town of the Ardennes. Rendell had taken a first, Martin a second, and Lawrence a third. Martin had entertained fears of a third and Lawrence of a fourth, so they agreed that things have been worse.
”Anyhow,” said Martin, as they went in search of tea and _gateaux_, ”that's an end of those infernal cla.s.sics.” Which was both an error on his part--for in Greats, as he later on discovered, one deals mainly with translation--and a commentary on the plain man's att.i.tude to the poets and orators by the time that he has been taught all about them.
IV
The summer term was a joyous interlude. Martin and Lawrence had nothing to do but play tennis or regard the world from a punt, and an early summer encouraged these methods of killing time. Rendell was cajoled by Petworth into entering for the Hertford scholars.h.i.+p, which involved some attention to the Latin language. While Martin read novels Rendell was perusing some of the worst poetry that the world has ever produced, it being the habit of the examiners to select pa.s.sages from the frigid obscurity of Silver Latin.
”There's your cla.s.sical education,” shouted Lawrence contemptuously.
”Silius Italicus and drivel about Etna and its siphons.”