Pinky Dinky.
We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to
King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh
HUSH! He wouldn't tell you-"
"He COULDN'T tell you."
"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads
about it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"
"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky Dinky has a
doubt-"
Some one protested.
"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation
whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call
goodform… There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the
world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there… And anyhow there's no
particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him. He's
jolly Awful of course and all that-"
"The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."
"A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's-the Pig!"
"If once he began to think about sex, how could he be comfortable at
croquet?"
"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's
what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice
dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is
soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing
that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made
into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice
disposition not to take on the job! How the Devil is a great Empire
to be run with men like him?"
"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on
the fender, "it's just a nervous sniggering-because he's afraid…
Oxford's no better."
"What's he afraid of?" said I.
"God knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.
"LIFE!" said Esmeer. "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a
thoughtful silence for a time.
"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos,
"what is the adult form of the Pinky Dinky?"
But there we were checked by our ignorance of the world.
"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the
thought that had arrested our flow.
3
I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and
the organisation of the University. I think we took them for
granted. When I look back at my youth Iam always astonished by the
multitude of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us that
Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like having
eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of
middle age I can entertain very fundamental doubts about these old
universities. Indeed I had a scheme-
I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of
the political combinations I was trying to effect.
My educational scheme was indeed the starting-point of all the big
project of conscious public reconstruction at which I aimed. I
wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the
governing class out of a consolidated system of special public
service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I
was given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from
the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily as from the
Education Office. Iam firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of
reforming the old public schools and universities to meet the needs
of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost
would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have
sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do think it would be
quite practicable to side-track, as the Americans say, the whole
system by creating hardworking, hard-living, modern and scientific
boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the public
service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public
without any absolute obligation to subsequent service.
Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new
college system with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern
history, European literature and criticism, physical and biological
science, education and sociology.
We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut
the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all. I should
have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old
public schools and the Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I
had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found
others. I should have aimed at making a hard-trained, capable,
intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would
have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on
the men through their vacation, and somehow or other I would have
contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could have seen to
it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis
with the vicarage daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom
fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it
isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had military
manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering and so
forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I
should have fed and housed my men clean and very hard-where there
wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high
pressure douches…
I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came
down, and so far as the Empire goes, I want to get clear of those
two places…
Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
lowness and dampness almost exactly like the feeling of an
underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling
of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow
ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas.
Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic
system and none of its evil…
Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but