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.
"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are
we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't
to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these
extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we
won't use 'em. Good God! what do you think a university's for?"…
Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of
us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were
going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in
and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately
experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent
psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within
a fortnight of our great elucidation.
The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of
sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our
intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our
imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went
round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall
prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy
November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from
Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we
weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The
fine dim night-time spaces of the Great Court are bound up with the
inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of
Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular
associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech,
that almost painfulgoal delivery of long pent and crappled and
sometimes crippled ideas.
And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called
Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing inn and a river that
goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we
boated and bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the
body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to
restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and
outfitters.
Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how
splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething
minds! We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs
towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen
moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with
one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were
no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But
Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was
gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of
her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!
Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be
married to him-we thought that splendid beyond measure,-I cannot
now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A
sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal
intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such
talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotionaldreaming, and if
by chance we passed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's
daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or
obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that
one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless
conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?
We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially
this same emancipation returns to those ancient courts beside the
Cam. We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase
that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword,
namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if
they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I
disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak,
and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a
companion I never cared for in the slightest degree…
This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped,
our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and
three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was
Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was
Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken
the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three
years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days
it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.
2
It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream