THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 71 
 
 rlu~~ 

 
 The Highbrows
 
 of To-day 
 
 (Uniform with this volume) 
 
 A French Girl in London by A. Orna 
 
 People by Pierre Hamp 
 
 Helen by Allan Monkhouse 
 
 The Woman and the Priest by Grazzia Deledda 
 
 The Age of Consent by Evelyn Fane
 
 The Highbrows 
 
 A Modern Novel by C. E. M. Joad 
 
 Jonathan Cape 
 
 Eleven Gower Street, London
 
 First published in 1922 
 All rights reserved 
 
 Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner, Frame and London.
 
 PR 
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 FOREWORD 7 
 
 1 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 9 
 
 2 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 63 
 
 3 AN IDYLL 98 
 
 4 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 121 
 $ REAL SENTIMENT ! 168 
 6 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 182 
 
 5 
 
 515865 
 
 PHILOSOPHY
 
 Foreword 
 
 THIS book is dedicated to all those who will think 
 it immature, which of course it is, and will 
 deny that it is a novel, which equally of course it isn't. 
 At the same time, it is a sufficiently near approximation 
 to a modern novel to be pardonably mistaken for one. 
 
 It makes no pretence at plot ; the incidents are few 
 and sketchy ; the characters are mere puppets for the 
 writer to hang his polemical hat on ; while the con- 
 versation is perhaps hardly so brilliant as frequent. 
 
 There is no continuity, and no sequence of incident. 
 Instead, we have moralizing essays, rhetorical exercises, 
 and didactic discussions sufficient to justify the sug- 
 gestion that the author regards his novel as a sort of 
 dust-bin into which to shoot his refuse ideas and the 
 cinematographic impressions of a young man who looks 
 at the world, and relies upon the stores of reminiscence 
 instead of upon the play of imagination when he comes 
 to write his novel. 
 
 The young man is as modern as the novel : just too 
 clever to qualify for the ecclesiastical or educational 
 professions, he is not clever enough to make a novelist ; 
 too artistic in temperament to be a successful man of 
 the world, he lacks the creative faculty of the artist. 
 He is an artist nevertheless in everything except out- 
 put, which means that he is versatile, restless and 
 
 7
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 ineffective, and, following the habit of his kind, seeks 
 in tendencies and views of life the satisfaction he fails 
 to find in life itself. 
 
 It may well be asked whether such a bundle of 
 impressions were worth recording ; it may also be 
 asked why it should be assumed that, when recorded, 
 they are worth reading ? 
 
 The form of the modern novel has been the subject 
 of much controversy : it has been vigorously assailed 
 and as vigorously defended ; but no critic, so far as I 
 am aware, has thought to develop the form to its 
 logical conclusion by writing a novel which is far more 
 like a modern novel than any novel ought to be, and in 
 so doing, to pass a commentary upon it more significant 
 than the most searching of reviews. 
 
 It is not suggested that this course has necessarily 
 been adopted in the pages which follow ; but it is 
 hoped that a presentation in a salient form of the more 
 eccentric characteristics of the novel as it is to-day, will 
 enable critics to estimate with more certainty than 
 they appear to do at present, the significance of those 
 developments in literary form which we are accus- 
 tomed to regard as peculiarly modern. 
 
 C. E. M. J. 
 
 8
 
 Chapter i : Dabbling in the Slums 
 
 ON the fifth evening of his first term, Pramp was 
 sitting in his rooms wondering if it were possible 
 to work in Oxford. Enter with enthusiasm and a rush 
 a tall, fair-headed man, clean-limbed and pink-faced. 
 
 " You'll come to our Lads' Club, won't you ? " he 
 said. 
 
 " What's that ? " 
 
 " Oh, a club the College runs for errand boys down 
 in St. Clement's. That's a poor part of Oxford, you 
 know. You'll get some literature about it in a day or 
 two, and the annual meeting comes off next Sunday 
 in the College Hall." 
 
 " But what do you do there ? " 
 
 " Oh, just go down and talk to the boys and rag 
 about with them. You needn't be any special good at 
 entertaining or anything, you know ; but it's quite 
 easy, though you feel a bit awkward at first. If you 
 are any good at boxing or gym or fretsaw it would be 
 awfully useful, and we're hoping to do a play this 
 term." 
 
 " I should like to help in that. I did a little acting 
 at school." This was modest for Pramp, who had 
 really created something of a furore in school plays, 
 had always taken the leading parts and been offered a 
 job by an Old Boy, who was present, in a third-rate
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 provincial company, which had since gone bankrupt. 
 
 " Well, come down next Thursday night. We'll get 
 some of the boys together who are likely to take part, 
 and you can see what you can do with them. Some 
 other freshers will be coming too. Be in the porch at 
 8 o'clock." 
 
 " All right," said Pramp, who had no intention of 
 fulfilling his promise. 
 
 Before Thursday evening came, however, there was 
 the annual meeting on Sunday. Oxford was just then 
 convulsed in the throes of a great spasm of Social 
 Reform. Reaction from the Newman spirit, plus a 
 dash of the prevalent socialism, had moulded and 
 directed it along the lines of heartiness and social 
 intercourse with the masses. All the phenomena of 
 Revivalism, except religion, which formed a sort of 
 background to the whole, never obtruded but always 
 vaguely immanent, might be observed. One must go 
 down and live among the workers, study their lives at 
 close quarters, and patronize no longer from a social 
 pedestal. Social distinctions were to vanish for the 
 slummer. He might tyrannize over his scout and 
 enjoy the unearned income of the parasite, but during 
 'the actual period of slumming all classes were to be 
 regarded alike as children of the God of good-fellow- 
 ship. As a concrete expression of this spirit, great 
 tentacles stretched out from the Alma Mater in the 
 shape of Settlements which were to embrace the slums 
 of London and imbue them with Christianity, lounge 
 coats and the Oxford manner. Orgiastic orators came 
 each term to Oxford pleading for men and money in 
 the great task of renovating the poor. The earnest 
 went slumming for at least a week in every vac., 
 cultivated with conscious assiduity the friendship of 
 
 10
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 butchers' assistants and bus conductors, and bedecked 
 their mantelpieces with photographs of their humble 
 friends and cards showing their football fixtures. 
 
 Religion was not to be forced down the throat of the 
 working lad. The quiet example of the upright, 
 helpful life was held more potent than the conscious 
 reference to the obvious God. It was sufficient to 
 seduce the boys from the cinema and the pub, it 
 being assumed that the Deity would follow somewhere 
 in the rear. Thenceforward He always lurked in 
 ambuscade, ready to snatch the ripe fruit of young 
 souls when a course of heartiness and clean living had 
 brought them to maturity. 
 
 The movement had its psychological as well as its 
 religious side. For the future rulers of the country 
 it was necessary to study at close quarters the future 
 ruled. Stress was laid on the importance of " getting 
 to know " the boys. The slumming undergraduate 
 was animated by something of the collector's interest. 
 The unsuspecting poor were examined, dissected, 
 indexed, catalogued under distinctive types, and lodged 
 for future reference in the young statesman's mind to 
 point a moral or to illustrate a speech. Thus the 
 prevalent catchword was, " We get just as much, if not 
 more, good from them than they do from us." This 
 may well have been possible, for though no marked 
 difference was observable in the boys under the treat- 
 ment of the University visitation, the Lads' Club set in 
 the College came early to be distinguished by certain 
 unmistakable characteristics. 
 
 Strong, the president of the club, and the first 
 speaker at the meeting which was duly attended by 
 Pramp, served as an embodiment of the ideals to which 
 the supporters of the club endeavoured to aspire. A 
 
 II
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 large, red-haired man with striking features, his 
 aggressive dogmatism on any subject with which he 
 was acquainted, and his pretentious diffidence with 
 regard to the few with which he was not, were only 
 prevented from being offensive by the unfailing sense of 
 humour and geniality which bubbled out of him like a 
 perennial spring. He was so entirely a " muscular 
 Christian," with a permanent mission to make the 
 world every day so much the better from the fact of 
 his being in it, that had he been a smaller man he would 
 have had no time to be anything else. 
 
 In point of fact, however, so far was Strong the 
 Christian from swamping Strong the man, that his 
 missionizing in the slums was much more the expres- 
 sion of an unbounded energy and egoism than of any 
 fundamentally Christian impulse. The Lads' Club 
 provided him with a safety valve for his superfluous 
 ego. He craved the limelight at all costs, even if the 
 limelight was only a gas flare, and the impressionable 
 material of massed errand boys provided him at once 
 with an audience and a stage from which to pose to the 
 world. At the club he divided his time between 
 reading evangelical lectures to erring adolescence and 
 capering in the limelight for the amusement of his 
 favourites. He never failed to gather round him a 
 collection of small boys, at whose heads he delivered 
 in impartial chunks a peculiar kind of elephantine 
 humour, reverting in its primitive and personal 
 characteristics to the wit of the preparatory school. 
 He was invincible at cheap repartee, and had a feminine 
 capacity for terminating every conversation to his own 
 advantage. 
 
 Next to the Lads' Club, the semi-philosophical 
 discussions so common at Oxford gave the best scope 
 
 12
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 for his dialectical skill. He was ambitious to fill the 
 role of the scholarly and pre-eminently up-to-date 
 Christian, who has his fingers on the ropes of all the 
 latest scientific and philosophical doctrines, and has 
 successfully bridled and harnessed them to his religious 
 cart. 
 
 It was in the same vein that in politics he figured as 
 an enlightened Tory, cognisant but contemptuous of 
 all branches of so-called advanced political thought. 
 He deprecated the present half-digested education of 
 the masses as more harmful than their previous 
 ignorance, carefully acquainted himself with Socialist 
 doctrines, sifted them and rejected them as tending to 
 create a purely destructive discontent. 
 
 He was an eloquent speaker, and magnetized all but 
 the most cynical freshers. 
 
 " When you first go down to the club," he said, 
 " you'll feel like a helpless ass who doesn't know what 
 to do with his hands, and hasn't a word to say for him- 
 self. I simply hated it at first. But if you stick it out 
 you'll soon find your feet. Talk to the boys about 
 whatever they are interested in, the club football and 
 cricket teams, or the books they've read, and make a 
 point of getting to know one or two boys intimately. 
 Above all, don't be superior. You will find them 
 surprisingly quick at sizing you up, and if they see any 
 evidence of standoffishness or superiority, they'll dis- 
 miss you once and for all with ' He's a bally gent,' and 
 you will never get any further with them. To be a 
 ' bally gent ' is the most severe and contemptuous 
 criticism they can pass on you. 
 
 "You see, the sinister reputation of the ordinary 
 undergraduate in the town saddles us with a great re- 
 sponsibility. You must remember that these boys only 
 
 13
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 see undergraduates in the streets, that is, when they are 
 at their worst. Their conception of the typical under- 
 graduate is of some knut in evening dress, always rowdy 
 and often drunk, strolling along arm in arm with three 
 or four others, swearing at anyone who gets in his 
 way, and accosting loose women. The undergraduate 
 is thus condemned by the better boys as a low snob, the 
 enemy of the townsman, and worshipped by the rotters 
 as the ideal model of what a really swagger young man 
 should be. The greatest difficulty you have to fight 
 against is the kind of answer you are continually 
 getting from boys whom you try to dissuade from 
 betting or swearing or talking immorally : * Get along 
 with you. Why, that's what I heard that young 
 
 gentleman from College say the other night. 
 
 What's good enough for him is good enough for us. 
 What's the harm in it if he says it ? ' 
 
 " That's the picture of the undergraduate we've got 
 to wipe away, and that's why we want you all to come 
 to the club. Will you come and help us ? " 
 
 During the next few days, Strong contrived to have 
 a word with almost every fresher individually on the 
 subject of the club, with the result that many young 
 men less impressionable than Pramp found that they 
 had come to Oxford to get an interest in the poor. 
 
 On Thursday, at 8 o'clock, Pramp duly went down to 
 the club ; Crosby, who had originally called on him, 
 conducted him, in company with four other sheep-like 
 freshers, through some slums of incredible dinginess to 
 a tall tumble-down building, with every pane in every 
 window shattered, whence issued pandemonium in- 
 describable. Inside were dust, bare rooms with paper 
 peeling from the walls, a staircase with broken stairs 
 and no banisters, and innumerable boys, dirty and
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 raucous, laughing and yelling, wrestling and smelling, 
 who took not the slightest notice of the entry of the 
 freshers. A few embarrassed undergraduates were 
 vainly trying to enforce a little order. 
 
 There was a football room lit by two flaring jets in 
 which the dust made it quite impossible to see the ball, 
 a billiard room with the cloth cut in five places, cues 
 without tips, and pockets without bottoms, and a 
 gym with horizontal and parallel bars upon which a few 
 boys in their coat sleeves were indulging in some desul- 
 tory exercises. 
 
 The floor of the gym was littered with a collection 
 of tattered boxing gloves which were being used as 
 missiles by a small band of young ruffians who hurled 
 them with unerring aim at the more salient features of 
 the anatomies of the earnest who were pursuing physi- 
 cal culture on the horizontal bars. A nicely timed shot 
 caught Pramp full in the mouth with a particularly 
 old and evil-smelling glove, just as the flock of freshers 
 entered. Pramp giggled as heartily as he could. 
 
 At the end of the gym stood a piano with its yellow 
 keys scarred and cracked, cacophonously strident in 
 tone, upon which a small boy was picking out " Rule 
 Britannia " with two fingers. 
 
 Nowhere was there any attempt at order or organiza- 
 tion. 
 
 Pramp, left to himself, felt entirely superfluous. He 
 tried to get up a conversation with a quiet-looking boy 
 about the club football teams. It failed dismally as the 
 boy's ignorance on the subject was as great as his own, 
 and he was about to leave the place in disgust when a 
 boy came up to him, pulled at his sleeve and shouted 
 in his ear : 
 
 " Was you the gen'leman as was going to start the 
 
 15
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 play ? " Pramp admitted that he had said something 
 about it, whereupon he was immediately conducted by 
 the boy up some more steps to the third storey. They 
 entered an upper room, lit by a single candle (the gas 
 burner had been broken off the night before and was 
 quite useless), inhabited by six turbulent-looking boys 
 and Crosby, who was vainly beseeching them to keep 
 quiet. 
 
 " Oh, here you are, Pramp," said the latter. " This 
 is the play that we've decided on, and these boys are 
 going to take part. See what you can do with them, 
 will you ? " Whereat he held out a tattered playbook 
 entitled " Jemmy and the Copper," nodded to Pramp 
 and left the room. 
 
 Thus Pramp took over the dramatic management of 
 the club. 
 
 It did not take long to become acquainted with the 
 members of the cast and the acquaintance, aided by a 
 gradual elimination of the unruly ones, grew into liking. 
 Pramp visited the club at least once a week, and, by 
 dint of threats, bribing and cajolery, gradually got 
 about three-quarters of the play rehearsed. The last 
 scene never was rehearsed, mainly owing to the con- 
 tinued failure of the actors to turn up in time. Conse- 
 quently on the night the actors, who had forgotten or 
 had never learnt their parts, extemporized through the 
 gaps in the prompting by throwing chairs and tables 
 about the stage and by indiscriminate scuffling. This 
 part of the performance was greatly appreciated by the 
 audience, and when owing to the unparalleled energy 
 of the actors, the floor of the jerry-built stage, which 
 had only been put up that afternoon, gave way, and 
 the hero disappeared through a hole between two 
 boards, taking the carpet with him, the curtain came 
 
 16
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 down amid shouts of enthusiasm from the massed boys 
 and parents who took this unrehearsed effect as the 
 climax of a very spirited performance. 
 
 I suppose it is given to every member of the middle- 
 class at sometime or other to make observations on the 
 various phenomena exhibited by the working-classes. 
 One is almost tempted to think that the main function 
 of the working-classes is to supply material for middle- 
 class reflection, and every student is struck by a differ- 
 ent feature. To Pramp the lower classes, as personified 
 by the members of the Lads' Club, appeared to be most 
 pre-eminent for their complete lack both of unhappi- 
 ness and concentration. They were indecently happy, 
 and incredibly changeable. The essence of public 
 school and University tradition lies in the assumption of 
 the principle that when one has once " taken up " 
 something one doesn't abandon it till one has either 
 mastered it or proved oneself incapable of mastering 
 it. 
 
 These are the qualities which are alleged to have 
 made England what it is. Pramp was pained to find 
 that the club boys lacked them. Any attempt at 
 organized games or instruction at the club, anything 
 demanding concentration, mastery of difficulties or 
 continued effort was doomed to failure from the first. 
 
 For instance, a fretwork class would flash as a heaven- 
 sent inspiration into the mind of one of the committee. 
 Generosity, duly acknowledged, provided the tools, and 
 the president imparted the necessary information to a 
 half-amused, half-eager assemblage of boys after prayers. 
 Names were given in for a class, and the time for the 
 first session was fixed. The first evening all the selected 
 would appear, and half the rest of the club besides. 
 Most of the evening would be devoted to excluding the
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 undesirables, and enlightenment into the mysteries of 
 fretwork from a nervously sweating undergraduate 
 would follow during the remainder. A few saws would 
 be broken and the session would close. At the next 
 meeting half the class only would turn up, at the next 
 one or two. By this time all the tools would be in 
 various stages of dissipation, the wood stolen, and the 
 enthusiasm evaporated. The fretwork class would 
 die, to be renewed again with equal faith a year after- 
 wards. 
 
 Similar attempts were continually being made to 
 provide some kind of light instruction. Stories would 
 be read, discussions initiated, or essays set, the boys 
 being induced to send in contributions by the hope of a 
 prize. A couple of essays of a shameless crudity, which 
 should have disqualified their authors for any reward, 
 had it not been decided to give a prize in any case, 
 would be sent in. The prizes would be duly given in 
 the presence of the assembled club, and a further essay 
 competition would be announced. There would be no 
 competitors. 
 
 A debating society arose from time to time Phrenix- 
 like from its oft repeated ashes with eternally the 
 same result. The boys were incapable of making set 
 speeches ; humour from the corner of a personal and 
 abusive kind was rampant, and the debate usually sub- 
 sided into an acrimonious conversation between two 
 or three members on entirely irrelevant subjects. 
 
 Pramp experienced the same difficulty with his re- 
 hearsals. The company would promise faithfully to 
 appear at a given hour on a given night. Twenty 
 minutes after the time, about half of the cast would 
 foregather with discouraging news of the other half. 
 Bert would bring news that Buckham could not come, 
 
 18
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 and that he himself would have to leave early as he was 
 taking his girl to the cinema. 
 
 " Where's Scragg ? " Pramp would say. 
 
 " Oh ! Scragg ain't a'coming." 
 
 " Why not ? He said he would. What's the old 
 blighter doing ? " 
 
 " 'E's meeting his girl." 
 
 " Where's George ? " 
 
 " He's gone over to Oseney." 
 
 " Well, he might have let me know. What about 
 Frank ? " 
 
 " I don't believe Frank never meant to come. He 
 goes to his ambulance class now." 
 
 Occasionally they would avow frankly that they were 
 fed up with the whole concern. It was a rotten 
 play. They weren't any good at acting. They didn't 
 come there to be sworn at, or to be laughed at by 
 College gentlemen. Mr. Pramp had better get some 
 gentleman from College to do the part. But as 
 surely as Mr. Pramp gave a recalcitrant up in disgust, 
 he would appear at the next rehearsal, and finding his 
 own part filled, would embellish the proceedings with 
 extemporary interpolations necessitating his reintro- 
 duction as a legitimate member of the cast if only to 
 stop his mouth. 
 
 The main characteristic of the whole club was pre- 
 cisely this spasmodic kind of activity, a desultoriness 
 that precluded any sustained interest in anything, but 
 not altogether surprising perhaps when it be remem- 
 bered that the boys came to the club for relaxation after 
 ten or eleven hours' running errands, full of a super- 
 fluous physical energy which demanded an outlet in 
 boxing, or football, or indiscriminate ragging, not in 
 concentration or sustained mental effort. But these
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 considerations were beyond the reach of the committee, 
 again not surprising when a horrified amazement is 
 seen to pervade the whole of the middle-class at the pre- 
 ference shown by working boys for spending their 
 evenings in pubs or cinemas instead of at evening 
 classes provided by a conscientious education author- 
 ity, thus light-heartedly abandoning with the wanton 
 irresponsibility of the lower classes, the chances of 
 self-improvement gratuitously offered by a benevolent 
 legislature at middle-class expense. 
 
 Thus, though the club aimed always at instructing, 
 it succeeded only in amusing. But even this limited 
 achievement was a source of gratification. 
 
 In various ways the committee managed to per- 
 suade themselves that the work they were doing at 
 the club mattered enormously, and the influence of a 
 personality such as Strong's was potent to infect the 
 College with the same persuasion. 
 
 Sunday came to stand out as the crowning day of 
 the club week. Punctually at three in the afternoon, 
 Strong and one or two others would open the club for 
 the purpose of holding service. Half a dozen boys 
 expelled by the bulging stuffiness of their fat-pervaded 
 dining-rooms, or impelled by the desire to win favour 
 as godly youths, straggled into the gymnasium, which 
 acted as an extemporary chapel, murdered two or three 
 hymns, gaped through a slab of the Bible administered 
 by way of lesson, and submitted passively to a " talk." 
 
 The latter was a monologue, which carefully shunned 
 the appellation " Sermon." The fiction that the boys 
 bestowed as much as they received, a fiction maintained 
 even when they sat silent under the words of the 
 admonisher, was carefully maintained in the use of the 
 word " talk." Strong talked mainly of unselfishness 
 
 20
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 and manliness, of abstention from dealings with young 
 women, except in the way of chivalry, of forbearance 
 and the rendering of small services to other members of 
 the club; They were to go to bed nightly feeling that 
 they had illuminated each day by at least one good 
 deed. They were to console themselves in the midst 
 of disappointments by the reflection that the world 
 was at least one jot and tittle the happier and the 
 better each day from the fact that they had lived in it. 
 Loyalty to the club was apparently a way to salvation, 
 and the club came to be endowed with a corporate 
 personality like the Hegelian State. 
 
 Pramp, who once ventured to discuss the basis of 
 Christian belief, deprecating crude conceptions of 
 marble halls harp re-echoing on the one hand, and 
 babies frying in their own blood on the other was 
 advised that such rationalistic speculations were well 
 enough for intellects strengthened by Philosophy, but 
 taken undigested by those unversed in controversy 
 were apt to unsettle and impair the unquestioning 
 obedience to Christian precepts so beneficial for the 
 boys. Simple doctrine was required for working lads : 
 the literal word was their proper food. 
 " Service over, attempts were made to read to the boys 
 from the work of some manly author ; Treasure Island 
 or Sherlock Holmes were the most favourite compro- 
 mises between the desire to elevate the taste to good 
 literature, and the necessity of pleasing the taste in bad. 
 Pramp tried recitals of ghost stories, but these were dis- 
 approved of as being over-sensational. 
 
 After tea, taken on return to College, the club com- 
 mittee would meet in one of the dons' rooms. Mr. 
 Rowlands, the don in question, took a paternal though 
 somewhat Olympian interest in the club, because he 
 
 21
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 regarded it as a means of introducing the future rulers 
 of the country to the practical problems of social 
 reform, and the future ruled to God and the cheerful 
 altruism appropriate to their station, as a set-off to 
 beer and women, which otherwise might have won 
 their hearts. It also afforded a good theme for elabora- 
 tion before disappointed parents, showing that their 
 sons had at least not " wasted their time at the Univer- 
 sity." Activity in the club could be represented as 
 bringing their sons a knowledge of the real problems of 
 the world, a splendid substitute for success in schools, 
 providing insight into life instead of into books. His 
 connexion with the club also won him a reputation in 
 the College for being up to date and in touch with 
 modern affairs, not confined in the more generous 
 reaches of his mind to the narrow sphere to which his 
 professorship confined him. (He knew about Greek 
 inscriptions.) 
 
 He was chiefly witty at committees, and was the 
 master of an esoteric phraseology and an elephantine 
 childlikeness that endeared him to the hearts of the 
 hearty. At times he was even brilliant with quota- 
 tion and metaphor, but his brilliance was the brilliance 
 of a well-soaped bald head, glistening not naturally but 
 as the varnish of erudition laid upon a primitive mild- 
 ness. He would profess, for instance, a childlike delight 
 in the annual visitation to Oxford of a circus, and was 
 to be seen nightly admiring the antics of cockney cow- 
 boys in the centre of a crowd of applauding " club 
 men." He was particularly useful in keeping the 
 rambling discussions of the committee to the point, 
 except when the digressions were the outcome of his 
 own wit. 
 
 Bowels, the secretary, was officious and elegant. He 
 
 22
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 did no work for the club, but looked beautiful, came 
 from Eton and served the double purpose of a figure- 
 head and a scapegoat. He had no enemies and no 
 acquaintances. Every one he knew was one of his 
 closest friends. He never said anything at all at 
 committees. Pramp was admitted as a neophyte to 
 membership of the committee after two terms, and 
 was duly impressed into silence by Strong's palpable 
 sense of the honour that membership bestowed. 
 
 The reading of the minutes imparted an air of 
 formality to the proceedings, which Strong, as presi- 
 dent, tried desperately hard to maintain. Efficient 
 transaction of business was, however, continually 
 punctuated and delayed by discursive passages of 
 recriminatory heartiness between the members. 
 
 " There's been another case of stealing this week," 
 Strong would say. " Somebody got into the office in 
 the daytime and broke open the cash-box. There's no 
 evidence, but we half-suspect Rousy Price." 
 
 " How do you propose to bring it home to him ? " 
 says Rowlands. 
 
 " Well, the first thing to find out is if it really is done 
 in the daytime as we suspect, or during club hours at 
 night ; we don't know which yet." 
 
 " Couldn't we tie some cotton across the doorway in 
 the daytime, shut the door, and see if it's broken at 
 night ? " Crosby proposed. 
 
 " I didn't know you were a Sherlock Holmes, Billy. 
 Been reading his Memoirs ? " 
 
 " No, Billy works too hard to have time for Sherlock 
 Holmes, doesn't he ? ' : 
 
 Rowlands looks round for confirmation of his 
 estimate of the amount of work done by Billy. Every- 
 body bears testimony, some for, some against, the extent 
 
 23
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 and duration of Billy's academic labours. Contro- 
 versy rages ; some even asserting that the cotton pro- 
 posal was an original inspiration from the fertile well of 
 Billy's mind, and the question of whether this was or 
 was not so now displaces the intensity of Billy's work 
 as the main theme. 
 
 Eventually Strong, in desperation, would say : 
 " Well, what about Rousy Price ? " 
 
 " Couldn't some one stop in the office all day, have 
 his meals there and watch ? Bowels hasn't much work 
 to do." Bowels protested that he had. 
 
 " It's jolly risky trusting Bowels alone in the same 
 room with the cash-box." 
 
 " And there's Mrs. Clark, the charwoman, down- 
 stairs. She wouldn't be safe alone in the house with a 
 man of Bowels' charm." 
 
 " I thought Rousy Price was rather a pet of Strong's/' 
 remarked Crosby. " I don't see why Strong should go 
 out of his way to suspect him particularly." 
 
 " Yes ! He's a sort of valet of mine," said Strong. 
 " He comes up to the College and brushes my clothes, 
 takes my boots to be mended and generally makes 
 himself useful." 
 
 " Well, you oughtn't to be so jolly well down on him 
 if you employ him." 
 
 " Ah, well. Every man's a Nero to his valet," 
 remarked Rowlands. 
 
 This sally produced protests and merriment from the 
 committee which impeded the transaction of business 
 for another five minutes. 
 
 So the committee rambled on. Drink and women, 
 staple themes for male humour, being tacitly taboo 
 among moral elevators, a certain sameness character- 
 ized much of the humour which centred largely round 
 
 24
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 the physical and facial peculiarities of the various 
 persons discussed. The abnormality of their appetites 
 would also furnish food for mutual jest. It is a trait 
 observable in the religious of Low Church sympathies 
 that they are unduly given to eating, just as vestments 
 and incense at the other pole of righteousness tend to 
 be associated with a mellow discrimination in matters 
 of wine. The pillars of the Lads' Club were no 
 exception to the stomachic idiosyncrasies of their kind, 
 even though the organ in question was not as yet dis- 
 tinguished by encasement in the cloth. 
 
 The proclivities of Strong for beef and Yorkshire 
 pudding were notorious, and as surely as his exploits 
 at the dinner-table duly refreshed the memory of his 
 friends on the point, so surely would they be recounted 
 for the enlivenment of the committee. 
 
 With so many extraneous themes for conversation, 
 and with Rowlands being witty in the background, it 
 was small wonder that questions of high policy, such as 
 the provision of a cricket field for the boys, the arrange- 
 ments for parents' night, the whipping up of slack 
 freshers, or the moral backslidings of Rousy Price were 
 squeezed out or but cursorily treated. Later they 
 would be settled expeditiously by the officer on the 
 spot, as the need arose. 
 
 Sunday committee meetings were ended by the 
 chapel bell. They were prolonged to the last minute, 
 ostensibly by pressure of business, more probably to 
 permit of the elect striding en masse into chapel in 
 the lull before service began. 
 
 The College, ranged on either side, could not fail 
 to be impressed with the phenomenon of righteous 
 solidarity thus presented to it. The committee, tall, 
 upstanding, vigorous and well washed, strode radi- 
 
 25
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 antly up the aisle in their surplices, marching to thank 
 God for the privilege of being his chosen vessels for 
 the spreading of the light in the slums of Oxford. 
 Dons smiled benignantly and undergraduates tried not 
 to look uncomfortable. Pramp, duly impressed, hence- 
 forth embraced Christianity and the Great Poor. 
 
 2 V 
 
 Pramp plunged so enthusiastically into the glories of 
 an Oxford summer term that the peculiar attractions 
 of the Lads' Club underwent a temporary eclipse. The 
 heated, rackety club, presenting to his nostrils the acrid 
 smell of poverty's clothes intensified by the hot weather, 
 the cheap gas flares, the stifling dust and threadbare 
 jokes, revolted what must be described in Pramp as the 
 awakening of an aesthetic sense. 
 
 Fortunately the club was permitted to slacken its 
 activities somewhat in the summer term. There was a 
 difficulty in inducing the boys to come in on fine, light 
 evenings. The energies of the committee were, more- 
 over, now becoming increasingly subordinated to pre- 
 parations for camp. 
 
 The camp was the crown and consummation of the 
 club year. For a whole week forty of the club lads 
 were transported to some secluded spot on the sea coast, 
 under the charge of eight or nine undergraduates. 
 They were housed in tents which they pitched them- 
 selves, and were divided into squads to forage, cook and 
 wash up in relays. Bathing, sports, long walks and an 
 open-air life, combined with a whole week's unrestricted 
 intercourse with the public school spirit, were to put the 
 finishing stroke to the year's work in moulding and 
 developing the boys. 
 
 All the influences for good which had been at work 
 
 26
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 upon them for the past year in the club, all the ideals 
 of loyalty, unselfishness and uprightness with which 
 they had formed acquaintance, but to which they had 
 given as yet but a fitful allegiance, were now to 
 be concentrated on the boys gathered together in a 
 community of their own, divorced from the baneful 
 influence of home and workshop, and were to send 
 them back to Oxford changed characters, self-reliant, 
 capable citizens of the great Empire which was their 
 heritage. 
 
 Such was the ideal of the camp week as conceived 
 by Strong, as fostered by the committee under his 
 influence, and as passively acquiesced in by Pramp. 
 
 Pramp arranged early to go to the camp, which was 
 to be established on the shores of the Solent, with the 
 New Forest in the background. The place had been 
 chosen principally because its remoteness from villages 
 and inns made it peculiarly difficult for the boys to fall 
 under the two temptations from which it was the par- 
 ticular function of the club to protect them : girls and 
 drink. Pramp had urged that, as they lived in the midst 
 of both these dangers, with every opportunity to suc- 
 cumb to either should they wish to do so during fifty- 
 one weeks of^ the year, it was hardly very important 
 to adopt these elaborate precautions during the fifty- 
 second. 
 
 He had been overruled, however, on the ground that 
 the spirit of the club, and the ideals with which it was 
 associated in the minds of the boys, rendered it impera- 
 tive that no breath either of women or alcohol should 
 dim the brightness of the club's shield of purity. 
 
 Pramp bicycled over from Southampton, where he 
 had been staying, on a fine June morning the first day 
 of a week of gloriously hot weather. The camp had 
 
 27
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 been pitched in a field of stubble about two hundred 
 yards from the sea, and the tents, six in number, were 
 already up. The boys and most of the members of 
 the committee, Strong, Crosby, Bowels, Mr. Rowlands 
 and Hadley, the secretary, a High Churchman destined 
 for Holy Orders, had already arrived. 
 
 Pramp's welcome from Strong did not seem to be as 
 hearty as he had expected ; but this apparent lack of 
 cordiality might easily have been due to the president's 
 extreme preoccupation, as he was sitting among a throng 
 of about twenty boys, vainly endeavouring to sort them 
 into their various tents, a proceeding rendered doubly 
 difficult by the fact that each boy wanted to be in a tent 
 with five or six chosen companions, most of whom 
 wanted to be in a tent with somebody else. 
 
 " Huilo Pramp ! " said Strong. " Just arrived ? 
 Good ! Have you got a mattress yet ? Bowels has 
 just taken half a dozen boys up to the farm to get straw 
 for the mattresses. You'd better go along too if you 
 want one. 7> 
 
 Pramp found a scene of great uproariousness in the 
 straw-yard of a little farm where Bowels was trying with- 
 out success to instil a little order into the six boys, who 
 were much too busy smothering one another in straw to 
 pay any attention to the filling of mattresses. 
 
 Pramp was hailed with acclamation and was soon 
 rioting and scuffling with the rest, thus encouraging the 
 boys to disregard Bowels by lending them the counten- 
 ance of his official position. 
 
 It was dark before the mattresses were filled and 
 Pramp and the boys returned to the camp with their 
 arms round one another's necks, singing and shouting 
 uproariously. 
 
 Pramp fancied a note of disapproval in Strong's look. 
 
 28
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 Mr. Rowlands regarded him solemnly and inquired very 
 coolly whether he was enjoying himself. 
 
 " Rather," said Pramp. " We're going to have a 
 sing-song in my tent now. Who's in my tent ? Come 
 on!" 
 
 Everybody now wanted to be in Pramp's tent, scent- 
 ing lax authority and easy discipline, and Strong's 
 laborious apportionment was all undone. Pramp 
 finally found that the six largest boys had managed to 
 secure the desired places in his tent, by the simple 
 method of shouting down or intimidating all the smaller 
 claimants. They immediately retired in an ecstasy of 
 mutual approbation to the tent which they insisted on 
 regarding as a sort of castle, fiercely challenging any out- 
 sider to approach it, and singing music-hall songs at the 
 top of their voices with Pramp (who only discovered 
 later that singing in the tents was forbidden) to lead 
 them. 
 
 Supper followed in a sort of marquee which had been 
 erected for meals, prayers and other community func- 
 tions. The boys sat at long deal tables, and clamoured 
 for food like wild beasts. The University members 
 waited on them, scurrying from the kitchen to the mar- 
 quee with an enormous expenditure of effort and little 
 system in their endeavours to keep all the boys supplied 
 with food. 
 
 Pramp would appear burdened with plates of por- 
 ridge at the opening of the marquee to be greeted with 
 shouts, threats, cajolings and pleadings, according as the 
 method of command or supplication which appeared to 
 each boy as the most likely to bring him food. 
 
 " 'Ere Pramp, old sport, bring it 'ere." 
 
 " You wouldn't forget old Mike, Mr. Pramp, not old 
 Mike/' 
 
 29
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " No, don't give it to 'im, Mr. Pramp. He never 
 liked you, he didn't. I was always yer friend, Mr. 
 Pramp. I allus loved you, I did." 
 
 " Now then, Mr. Pramp, hurry up with the blessed 
 dope." 
 
 " 'Ere let's 'ave that porridge, or I'll cop yer one 
 afterwards." 
 
 " No, that ain't fair, Mr. Pramp. Scragg allus gets 
 'is before me. There's too much favouritism in this 
 club. That's what it is." 
 
 Serving at meals was one of the most exhausting func- 
 tions Pramp had ever performed ; in addition to the 
 fatigue of the performance, he was usually lusting for 
 food himself, but was not able to get any before all the 
 boys had been served, contenting himself meanwhile 
 with such surreptitious mouthfuls as he could manage 
 to swallow en route from the kitchen to the marquee. 
 
 There was a good deal of discussion after supper as to 
 which of the committee should go next morning, which 
 was Sunday, to early Communion at Beaulieu Church, 
 seven miles away ! A great display of self sacrifice and 
 self denial was exhibited, each member of the committee 
 insisting that he should be left behind to take charge of 
 the boys and bring them to church later in the morning, 
 and that the others should indulge in the comfort and 
 privilege of partaking of Holy Communion. As this 
 ceremony was to be followed by a substantial meal of 
 kidneys and bacon, to which they had been invited at 
 the Vicarage, it is possible that the self denial of those 
 who pleaded to be left behind was only in part assumed. 
 Strong, who had procured the invitation, must of course 
 go. After an edifying display of reluctance to accom- 
 pany him, and by so doing to desert the others, it was 
 settled that Hadley, whose need for divine intimacy 
 
 3
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 could be considered less immediately urgent than that 
 of the others, as his intended profession ensured it for 
 him for the remainder of his life, and Pramp, whose 
 Christian enthusiasm being of a modified intensity 
 was not thought to require sustenance, should be left 
 behind. 
 
 Pramp was awakened very early next morning, it ap- 
 peared afterwards that it was at 5.30 a.m., by the sound 
 of some one playing " The Merryman and his Maid " 
 from the " Yeomen of the Guard " on the cracked 
 piano in the marquee. The player only knew the 
 chorus, and very inadequately at that, and Pramp, who 
 lay in bed, exasperated at the impossibility of again 
 going to sleep, counted no less than twenty-five repeti- 
 tions of the same chorus. The tune stuck in his mind 
 ever afterwards, associating itself with the camp and all 
 that happened there, after the well-known manner of 
 tunes, a habit of theirs chiefly remarked, however, in 
 the case of songs of sentiment. 
 
 Pramp was next called upon to resist an exhortation 
 from Hadley to come and bathe before breakfast on the 
 ground that it would set such a good example to the 
 boys. Pramp hated before-breakfast bathing. The 
 process was unpleasant enough in itself, and ill-com- 
 pensated for the subsequent return to one's bedroom in 
 pyjamas and a blue and shivering condition misnamed 
 glow of health and exhilaration. But this was nothing 
 to the hot-eyed prickly feeling that supervened about 
 eleven o'clock in the morning, and the interminable 
 length of the day consequent upon the extravagant ex- 
 penditure of energy and effort upon the beginning of it. 
 There is a curious belief in England in the existence 
 of people who are early morning bathers, meaning all 
 the people we do not know ; Pramp had rarely met 
 
 3 1
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 anyone who paid other than an overnight lip service to 
 the habit of before-breakfast bathing. 
 
 Hadley was somewhat huffed at his refusal, and more 
 so when aft;er breakfast on the road to Beaulieu Church 
 Pramp marched on ahead with about twenty of the 
 largest boys, talking loudly and occasionally bursting 
 into choruses of music-hall songs, with a perfect roar 
 for " In the Shadows," just then at the zenith of its 
 popularity. 
 
 As they approached Beaulieu, Hadley came up to 
 Pramp and suggested that they should walk together in 
 advance, in order that the procession might approach 
 the church with some degree of seemliness. 
 
 Hadley was a fair-headed young man with that extra- 
 ordinary power of not looking at you, found as a rule 
 only in babies. He looked through Pramp and round 
 him, and over him, and under him, while he made 
 several trivial remarks about the scenery, their nearness 
 to Beaulieu, the quality of the vicar's preaching, and the 
 length of the service, and indulged in apprehensions as 
 to whether the boys would behave themselves during 
 the sermon. 
 
 " I hope you don't find my conversation boring," he 
 said at last to Pramp. " I'm afraid it isn't up to the 
 standard of you philosophy people." 
 
 Pramp was even more annoyed by this insincere 
 apology than by the trivialities which had preceded it. 
 
 " You were wise enough to set the standard so low, 
 that even you could not avoid talking up to it," he said, 
 and the rest of the walk to the church passed in silence. 
 
 The church was hot and crowded, and several of the 
 boys had to sit on the floor in the aisles, much to their 
 own amusement which found audible expression in 
 titterings. Pramp had a walking race home with two 
 
 32
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 of the boys, but did not get a meal until nearly half- past 
 two when the others arrived. It was not till after tea 
 that Strong, who had avoided him all day, took him by 
 the arm in his usual hearty way and asked whether he 
 would care for a stroll. 
 
 Pramp, somewhat surprised at this attention, acqui- 
 esced, and they went through a few fields talking camp 
 shop. 
 
 When they were some distance from the camp, 
 Strong stopped short by a gate. 
 
 " I want to have a talk with you, Pramp, about several 
 things," said he. " I know you'll think it awfully inter- 
 fering of me and will want to tell me to mind my own 
 business. My own view was in favour of not saying 
 anything to you ; but the committee thought that 
 some one ought to speak to you, and I agreed to do it, 
 as I suppose I know you better than any of the others." 
 
 " Yes ! " said Pramp vaguely, wondering apprehen- 
 sively what was coming. 
 
 " Well, it's about your behaviour with the boys. 
 The committee think that you are altogether too 
 familiar with them. Of course it is important not to 
 be standoffish and snobbish and all that, but at the same 
 time a certain amount of discipline has to be main- 
 tained, and the familiarity of your conduct weakens the 
 respect of the boys for you personally, and through you 
 for the College men generally. You rag about with 
 them too much. They are always throwing their arms 
 round your neck, or touching your hands, or wrestling 
 with you. That sort of thing isn't exactly nice with 
 anybody, and the boys are only too ready to jump at 
 conclusions and put an indecent interpretation upon 
 what is meant in pure good-natured friendliness, if you 
 once let them take liberties of that kind." 
 
 33 o
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Pramp was appalled. The thing Strong was clearly 
 trying to suggest seemed so repellent in connexion with 
 the boys that he could have killed Strong for hinting it. 
 Nothing had been farther from his thoughts in his inter- 
 course with the boys, and he said as much. 
 
 " Oh, I am sure you are quite innocent of any inten- 
 tions of that kind," said Strong, " but it's what the boys 
 think, and what we, that is the committee, have heard. 
 Some of the things the boys have said about you leave no 
 doubt as to what they think. You see the tone of your 
 conversation with them isn't exactly likely to render 
 suggestions of that kind impossible. For instance, you 
 are always talking to them about their girls. Now it 
 was decided when the club was started that the whole 
 atmosphere and influence of the place should be of a 
 kind to discourage talk of that sort in the club. 
 
 " The club was primarily intended to give the boys 
 a place to go to, where they would be out of the influ- 
 ence of the Oxford street-girls. The boys have never 
 been allowed to bring girls into the club, and no mem- 
 ber of the committee has ever spoken to them except 
 with disapproval on the subject, which has usually been 
 ignored." 
 
 " In fact, you tried to get rid of an evil by shutting 
 your eyes to it, and pretending it didn't exist," Pramp 
 broke in. 
 
 " Not at all. It was simply understood that nobody 
 mentioned women in the club. Talk about women 
 among that class of boy only means obscenity, and the 
 club has always set its face most strongly against any- 
 thing likely to encourage lewd talk. 
 
 " Nobody would dare to speak to any other member 
 of the committee about women, and yet they always 
 seem to be whispering furtive love affairs to you. 
 
 34
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 " But that isn't all, for while I am on the subject I 
 might as well say everything that is in my mind. 
 You've let us down badly over this, Pramp. Coming 
 down in the train several of the boys told Crosby that 
 they had seen you talking to street-girls at the fair on 
 Port Meadow the last night of term. Crosby had just 
 been warning them against talking to girls of this class, 
 and they replied that they had seen you doing it, and 
 that Mr. Pramp was a College gentleman, and that if 
 Mr. Pramp did it it must be all right for them. Of 
 course Billy was checkmated. His hands were 'tied 
 because he couldn't let you down by saying one 
 oughtn't to do it, and the boys scored off him badly. 
 
 " Now you know the reason for what you must have 
 noticed, that we somehow haven't felt able to treat 
 you in the same old free way this camp. It's like a 
 stab in the back that sort of thing, and apart from your 
 own good, you ought to consider that an example of 
 this kind from you is most injurious to the boys." 
 
 Pramp felt utterly crushed. That a few flippant 
 words with some factory girls on Port Meadow, and a 
 rather vigorous use of the toy balloons, buzzers and 
 paper mops, called " ladies' tormentors," could have 
 assumed such momentous significance was to him an 
 astonishing thing. He said of course that he was 
 awfully sorry. He said that he had no idea that this 
 thoughtless action on his part would make things so 
 difficult for the committee ; he said also that he would 
 be more reserved in his manner to the boys in future, 
 and in his heart he hated Strong for his priggishness, 
 which Strong had all the time done his best to dis- 
 claim by continually interlarding his remarks with " I 
 know you'll think me an awful prig for talking to you 
 like this," and for the humiliation he put upon him. 
 
 35
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 He hated the committee for discussing him behind 
 his back, for branding him as a black sheep, and dele- 
 gating to Strong, who obviously enjoyed the job as 
 much as any parent who tells his child that he whips 
 it for its own good, the duty of giving him a severe 
 moral lecture. He knew with an unalterable conviction 
 that Strong, despite his profession of distaste at the 
 job he had just performed, had relished it with all the 
 satisfaction of a confirmed moral meddler. Strong had 
 excused himself by saying that he felt it his duty to 
 speak to Pramp, but the word duty is a very convenient 
 label when we want to do something which is in an 
 equal degree unpleasant to somebody else, and pleasant 
 to ourselves. 
 
 Pramp dreaded the five days of camp yet to run. 
 He could hardly bear to meet the inquisitorial com- 
 mittee, who all professed in their manner so marked 
 an ignorance of the moral spring cleaning which had 
 just taken place, that it was evident at once that they 
 had metaphorically been listening at the keyhole all 
 the time. No body of men could have been so anxious 
 to convey the impression that their manner really had 
 not changed in the least, without being constrained by 
 their anxiety to change it in every word they uttered. 
 So eager were they to avoid noticing that something 
 unusual had taken place, that they never seemed to be 
 noticing anything else. 
 
 For the next day an expedition to the Isle of Wight 
 had been planned, the expenses being met out of the 
 generous pocket of Strong, or rather of Strong's father, 
 a Liverpool shipowner. Anyway, Strong got the credit 
 for it. 
 
 A seven- mile walk to Lymington and a sea passage to 
 Alum Bay was followed by a walk over the cliffs to Tot-
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 land Bay. Pramp, under the eagle eye of two com- 
 mittee men, had the greatest difficulty in repelling the 
 embarrassing advances of the boys, who wrangled and 
 fought for the seats nearest him in the boat. 
 
 They would take his arm when walking, or press him 
 with fruit and sweets, till he hated the popularity which 
 Strong had done his best to poison for him. Pramp 
 could not help wondering whether Strong, eclipsed for 
 once, had tasted sour grapes, but banished the thought 
 as unworthy. 
 
 At Totland Bay the position became acute. 
 
 A crowd of boys with Pramp had stopped outside a 
 small chemist's shop. The chemist, gifted with a pecu- 
 liar sense of humour or a Napoleonic taste in advertising, 
 had prefixed the most piquant labels to some aperient 
 pills and medicines of which he made a prominent 
 display. 
 
 Perhaps the air of Totland Bay tends to costiveness ! 
 Anyhow, the chemist, apparently a zealous alliterator, 
 had dressed up homely Eno's Fruit Salts and Castor Oil 
 Pills under such appetizing labels as " Lucy's Laxative," 
 " Aunt's Aperient," and " Clysters for Clerics." 
 
 The boys roared with laughter and insisted on a 
 detailed explanation from Pramp of what the labels 
 meant. Pramp had the greatest difficulty in putting 
 them off, his tongue being tied by the presence of Crosby 
 a few yards off. 
 
 Separate explanations of the words laxative, aperient 
 and clysters were demanded, and upon Pramp insisting 
 that they all meant practically the same thing, the boys 
 with a fine show of logic put the question why different 
 words were used. Here Pramp was able to diverge 
 from a discussion of the workings of the less reputable 
 portions of our anatomy to the allurements of allitera- 
 
 37
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 tion for certain types of mind, especially chemists, and 
 found himself upon safer ground. 
 
 Going home, Strong spoke to him again and asked 
 him if he was doing all he could to keep the boys from 
 undue familiarity. " They seem to me," said Strong, 
 " to treat you as if you were one of themselves." 
 
 " But surely that's the ideal of the club, to get rid of 
 all class barriers between ourselves and the boys, at any 
 rate while we are with them." 
 
 " Yes, within certain limits. But you let them go too 
 far, and they take advantage of it by always trying to 
 get you to talk about embarrassing things." 
 
 " Well, I've done whatever I could to-day to be 
 reserved with them, but they don't seem to have any 
 constraint with me as they do with you." 
 
 " That's just the difficulty," said Strong, and now 
 Pramp had not the slightest doubt that he spoke partly 
 in envy, and reproved in others what he was unable to 
 achieve for himself. 
 
 As the week proceeded and the time approached for 
 the boys to return to Oxford they grew more unruly and 
 impatient of restraint. 
 
 Several had been discovered drinking in a neighbour- 
 ing pub. They were confined to the camp for two days, 
 but as they were big fellows, double their number were 
 required to act as guards and unceasing surveillance 
 became necessary on the part of the committee to keep 
 them there. One boy was convicted of stealing and 
 packed off to Oxford on the spot. The same fate hap- 
 pened to another who was seen kissing a village girl, and, 
 what was worse, boasted of it. 
 
 On the last day sports were held, followed by a walk 
 to Beaulieu and high tea there. When they returned, 
 it was discovered that six of the boys, including three of 
 
 38
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 those who had previously been confined to the camp, 
 were missing. 
 
 It was already fairly dark, but search parties were sent 
 out. About a mile from the camp, Pramp, Strong and 
 two or three others who were searching together, came 
 upon the defaulters sitting under a bank drinking beer, 
 which they had bought in Beaulieu, and munching 
 chocolates. They did not seem in the least abashed at 
 being discovered. 
 
 " Why, blowed if it ain't Mr. Strong," said one. 
 
 " And good old Pramp with him ! " 
 
 " Come and have a drop, Mr. Pramp. It's fine beer, 
 this is." 
 
 " What be you a-doing of out here, Mr. Strong, 
 breaking rules by being out at this time of night ? I 
 am surprised at Mr. Strong, aren't you, Bert ? " 
 
 Strong mounted the high horse instantly. 
 
 " I suppose you think you are a very fine fellow, 
 Thomas, sitting here drinking beer and breaking rules. 
 I suppose you think this is a good return to make the 
 club for all the club has done for you. 
 
 " How many times do you think you have been turned 
 out of the club for good and all, and in a day or so back 
 you have come whining to me : * I won't cause any 
 trouble in future, I won't really.' And ' Oh, Mr. 
 Strong, do let me come to camp. I'll keep the rules, 
 and won't try to be a nuisance to the officers. I 
 promise on my honour, Mr. Strong.' 
 
 " Do you think conduct like this is going to help me 
 to trust your word of honour any more ? Do you think 
 this is loyalty to the club, to do all you can to make our 
 job here more difficult ? Is that all you care about it ? 
 
 " You've always professed to care for the club, 
 Thomas. If you did, I shouldn't expect you to show it 
 
 39
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 by going out of your way to defy us like this, and en- 
 couraging others to do the same. You can't have much 
 affection for the club if this is the way you make light 
 of all it stands for." 
 
 "The club's all right," growled Thomas. "No- 
 thing the matter with the club ! " 
 
 " Well, if you like the club, why don't you stand by 
 it like a man, instead of taking a silly pleasure in break- 
 ing rules like a schoolboy ? 
 
 " But putting aside what you think of the club and I 
 shan't believe you care much for it after this you knew 
 what the club rules were before you came. Nobody 
 asked you to come. What on earth do you mean then 
 by coming here if you don't intend to keep the 
 rules ? 
 
 " There are plenty of places where you can drink as 
 much as you like if you want to and make a hog of your- 
 self all day, and I don't care if you do. I've lost 
 interest in you. What you want to come here for, the 
 only place where you're not allowed to drink, I don't 
 know ? " A pause during which the boys looked em- 
 barrassed ! Then Strong took the bull by the horns. 
 
 " Come, Thomas, throw those bottles away, and 
 come back with us." 
 
 But Strong's last thrust had been a mistake in tactics. 
 By intimating that Thomas's welfare was no longer a 
 matter of concern to him, he had touched Thomas on 
 a sore spot, his pride. If Thomas was not worth a 
 gentleman's troubling about, then Thomas was not 
 going to trouble about the gentleman. Anyway, if 
 Mr. Strong meant what he said, he, Thomas, had done 
 it now and he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a 
 lamb. 
 
 " I bain't coming back, Mr. Strong, yet awhile. You 
 
 40
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 can get the others if you can, but I'm staying out a bit 
 longer yet." 
 
 At this Strong lost his dignity and his temper and 
 stooped to argue. 
 
 For ten minutes the wrangle went on while the other 
 defaulters chuckled apprehensively and backed up 
 Thomas. Then Strong strode forward to lay hands on 
 Thomas. Thomas rushed at him head down, butted 
 him in the stomach, winding him, and bolted. The 
 others followed. 
 
 All night they stayed out. The next morning they 
 appeared on the platform in time for the train back to 
 Oxford, but the outraged members of the committee 
 were stiff-necked and held no converse with them. 
 
 Pramp, who had come to see them off, could not 
 help thinking as they got into a carriage by themselves 
 that the victory lay with them. 
 
 They could jeer and exult over the helpless com- 
 mittee and the orderly ones under their care, and they 
 did with a vengeance. The others could not answer 
 back ; they were tongue-tied, the committee by 
 dignity, the boys by fear. 
 
 It seemed rather as if the bottom had fallen out of 
 things when it was shown that boys could look after 
 themselves without disaster, and even spend a night out 
 in the open without the shepderding care of the men 
 from College. It was distinctly an unfortunate episode ! 
 Certainly the camp had ended in an atmosphere of 
 gloom. 
 
 3 
 
 Pramp's attitude to the club cooled after the unfor- 
 tunate episode at camp. But he had not yet correctly 
 interpreted the cooling process to himself as the distaste 
 
 4 1
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 of a temperamental individualist for the collective 
 meddling with other people, strictly in the interests 
 of the meddled with, which was the doctrine of the 
 committee. 
 
 Most social workers are prompted at bottom by a 
 desire for self-assertion and self-importance. Lacking 
 the distinction to achieve this in their own sphere, they 
 are driven to transfer their activities to the sphere be- 
 neath them, where their superior manners and educa- 
 tion, aided by the inherent snobbishness of the British 
 race, procure for them an authority and respect from 
 sycophants and toadies, which the mediocrity of their 
 talents denies them from their social equals. The 
 toady too is automatically generated in considerable 
 numbers among the lower classes by the flattering 
 attentions of the social workers, as a growth of rank 
 fungus is nourished by the dew from heaven. 
 
 Pramp's dissatisfaction with the Lads' Club, how- 
 ever, took for the time an unexpected form. He be- 
 lieved not that all social work was futile, but that he 
 was not doing enough of it. The Lads' Club was too 
 narrow. He had intimate acquaintance with a few 
 poor boys, whereas he wanted to get into touch with 
 the Great Poor. 
 
 And where were the great poor to be found but in 
 London ? To London then he must go. As a social 
 worker at Carfax Hostel, University Hall, or some other 
 settlement in the East End, he would be able to hold 
 aloft the torch of Oxford and all she stood for, in those 
 gloomy caverns of the slums where the excluded inter- 
 mingle. 
 
 The East End for the earnest undergraduate before 
 the war was at once a challenge and a mystery. The 
 Crusading spirit was abroad ! Yet the myth of the
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 East End was only part of the more general and more 
 glorious myth of London. 
 
 For the normal undergraduate there was always 
 something of a London legend. To go to London on 
 Saturdays and return by the late train was one of the 
 recognized items in the complete undergraduate life. 
 A journey to London in those days was a romance. 
 When one remembers the delicious frisson of excite- 
 ment attendant on those day trips to Town from Ox- 
 ford, the opulent morning lolling on cushions in one's 
 first-class carriage, pipe in mouth, with vistas of droning 
 don in lecture room, one's habitual milieu at this illegi- 
 timate hour, to point the contrast, the meeting (how 
 often one was met !) at Paddington, the matinee 
 (guaranteeing at least a week's career as theatrical expert 
 on the staff of a University paper on return), the 
 intime and highly confidential dinner, let us say at 
 the " Petit Gourmand," the important fussing thence 
 to catch the 9.50 naively entitled the curiously in- 
 quisitive glances up and down the Paddington plat- 
 form, curious to discern a possible fellow-traveller, 
 inquisitive as to who was seeing him off, the furtive 
 eyeing for possible dons, the eager garnering of tit-bits 
 of information to spice Oxford small talk with extra 
 University sauce, the dreary journey, the rush for 
 taxis, the inadequate supply, the running for College 
 on the stroke of midnight, the barred gate, the after- 
 math of dean and fine when one remembers all these 
 esoteric details that served to engild a commonplace 
 day in Town with all the glamour of romance, it is 
 amazing in after years to notice the change that life and 
 not days in London reveals in these familiar haunts, the 
 grim drabness of Paddington, the dusty tawdriness of 
 the " Petit Gourmand." 
 
 43
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 These places then served as intimate pegs to hang our 
 romantic hats on. Now our romantic hats have shrunk 
 into Governmental, or it may be commercial bowlers, 
 while the pegs have dwindled respectively into a place 
 whence a man may travel, and a place where a man may 
 feed, and just nothing more. Life may be regarded as a 
 gift of the gods to be enjoyed by the young. More 
 often it appears as the cost of the Almighty's mistake 
 defrayed by the middle-aged. 
 
 At Oxford, on the whole, one tended to take the 
 former view ; but London is the most ingenious 
 machine yet invented for turning youth into middle- 
 age, for London changes life from a joke into a 
 responsibility. 
 
 At Oxford one welcomed, nay quested, adventures 
 romantic. In London one becomes painfully aware 
 that if one has a propensity for falling into the fire it is 
 as well to avoid lying on the hearth-rug. 
 
 From Oxford, Paddington is the portal that opens 
 upon the glamour of cosmopolitanism ; from London 
 it is the doorway to the villas of suburbia. 
 
 This difference of attitude is especially to be re- 
 marked when it comes to dealing with the East 
 End. 
 
 At Oxford, the East End is the happy hunting ground 
 of the collector for the Museum of Humanity. Figur- 
 atively we bottle the poor as specimens. We scru- 
 tinize pauperdom through the scientist's spectacles. 
 
 We are didactic, too, and reformatory. We know 
 things, and we tell the poor that we know them. We 
 go down from Oxford as embryo doctors and tell them 
 what to do with their bodies, or as embryo parsons and 
 tell them what to do with their souls. We observe the 
 East End as some modern fairyland, our object being to 
 
 44
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 reform it until it ceases to be any longer worthy of our 
 observation. 
 
 But once we are anchored in London, the East End 
 ceases to be a kind of resuscitated Holy Land to which 
 we lead bizarre Crusades and plant our flags in settle- 
 ments. It becomes an unpleasant and very real agglo- 
 meration of slums somewhere out beyond Aldgate 
 Pump. We go there no longer as Crusaders with a 
 mission, but as officials with a black bag, and we get 
 out of it as soon as we can. 
 
 Pramp went there definitely with the Oxford atti- 
 tude. He wanted to do social research, and he 
 planted his flag in that forcing house for embryo 
 parsons, University Hall. 
 
 " . 4 . 
 
 Pramp arrived at University Hall in the Christmas 
 Vacation, and was shown into a large comfortable up- 
 holstered room, which, he was informed, was the 
 Common Room. 
 
 It was empty when he entered it, and he had to fill in 
 half an hour with the copies of Punch, The Sketch, The 
 Tatter, The Observer, and other high-class periodicals 
 that lay scattered about the tables. 
 
 Presently a gong rang for tea and the inhabitants of 
 the Hall came trooping in, talking vigorously, and made 
 an impenetrable ring round the tea-table, where they 
 omitted to hand one another tea and cake. Pramp 
 was introduced by the urbanely smiling Chief to a 
 short eager-faced little man, with an energetic, import- 
 ant manner and an abrupt voice, named Clandon, 
 whose bedroom he was to share, and whose club he was 
 to attend. There were apparently six or seven clubs 
 belonging to University Hall, each run by one of the 
 
 45
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 inmates with a group of attendant satellites whose 
 special preserve it was. Clandon asked Pramp to be 
 ready to go with him to the club at half-past seven, and 
 left him to himself. 
 
 At the time named Pramp set out with Clandon, 
 Simmonds, a High Church curate, and two others. 
 
 The club proved to be a really elaborate con- 
 cern with large rooms occupying three storeys, two 
 billiard rooms, a coffee canteen, a properly appointed 
 gymnasium, and from two to three hundred boys all 
 on the premises at once. 
 
 Pramp's experiences with the Lads' Club at Oxford 
 soon enabled him to get on with the latter. They 
 were older, they were wittier and more intelligent, but 
 the essentials of the game of bluff and banter, the reit- 
 eration of jocularly abusive remarks with regard to their 
 clothing, their faces, their appetites or their feet 
 remained the same. 
 
 To Pramp this was simply a game and nothing more, 
 and he played it vigorously. A greater faculty for cheap 
 wit and an acceptable lack of dignity that distinguished 
 him from the other University Hall men soon made 
 him really popular. 
 
 By the third night he could always count on being 
 surrounded by a dozen or more boys directly he came 
 into the club, some of whom would stick to him and 
 follow him about all the evening. 
 
 His skill at billiards was also useful ; he could sing a 
 comic song, make an amusing speech, and was not above 
 a story about a girl. 
 
 It appeared from the first that Clandon disliked 
 Pramp's influence. Pramp would be sitting in a room 
 entertaining a dozen boys with accounts of the adven- 
 tures of University life, mainly fictitious. In the
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 midst of an uproarious conversation Clandon would 
 stroll into the room and on some pretext or other take 
 Pramp away with him to the Private Office, sacred to 
 the young men of University Hall, a Holy of Holies to 
 the boys. 
 
 " You know, Pramp," he would say, " one must be 
 very careful with the boys ; very careful in anything 
 that one says to them, not to let slip a word that they 
 might interpret as something loose, not quite nice, you 
 know. I don't mean for a moment that one inten- 
 tionally says such things, but you know the atmosphere 
 of their homes is so perverted that they try and 
 twist anything you say to them into a wrong meaning. 
 So you ought to be very careful in these stones you tell 
 them, never to mention anything about women." 
 
 " Did I do so ? " said Pramp. 
 
 " Oh no, I didn't hear anything of the kind ; but I 
 thought I'd better warn you. We never allow any 
 talk about women or girls in the club." Clandon 
 seemed continually on the watch for Pramp to commit 
 himself by some indiscretion. During a particularly 
 exciting game of billiards between Pramp and one of the 
 boys, when the spectators were jocularly indulging in 
 hypothetical bets, and the air was full of " Two to one 
 on Old Pramp," " I'll lay a tenner the old sport '11 get 
 home with a twenty break," " Garn ! I back Pramp to 
 get to ninety-nine and stop there," the sombre form of 
 Clandon would be seen hovering in the background, and 
 a private lecture to Pramp on the evils of the gambling 
 spirit in the clubs and the necessity of discouraging any 
 mention of betting, even though it were fictitious, 
 would follow. 
 
 On nothing, however, did Clandon, Simmonds and 
 others lay so much stress as on the need for absolute 
 
 47
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 teetotalism in the Club. " If you'd had my experience, 
 young man," Clandon, who was only about thirty 
 himself, said one night in the privacy of their joint bed- 
 room, " and seen as many young fellows as I have gone 
 wrong over drink, you would understand that you can't 
 be too often telling them the dangers of it. I shouldn't 
 wonder if the homes of half of these young men are 
 ruined by drink ; generally it's the father, but quite 
 often the mother." 
 
 " But surely that ought to be about as good a warn- 
 ing as they can have," said Pramp. 
 
 " Rather not ! Some of them have got it in their 
 blood. One chap I know, awfully decent fellow, had 
 been a member of the club for five or six years, never 
 touched a drop all the time, took to it about a fortnight 
 ago. I bailed him out at Old Street Police Station 
 on a drunk and disorderly charge only yesterday. It's 
 heartbreaking when a fellow you've tried as hard with, 
 as I did with John Stubbings, lets you down like that. 
 My reputation's gone down a lot in the club, I can 
 tell you." 
 
 " But do you forbid all strong drink ? " 
 
 " Absolutely at the club ! " 
 
 " You've never been drunk yourself, I suppose." 
 
 " Of course not. I am a teetotaler." 
 
 Too drunk with God, I suppose, thought Pramp, ever 
 to get drunk with anything else ! Wise man, Clandon, 
 not to mix his liquors ! 
 
 Pramp felt discouraged. There appeared to be no- 
 thing you could say to the boys without leading them 
 into some danger or other. 
 
 The middle-class morality, embodied in the aspira- 
 tions of the earnest young slummers at University Hall, 
 painted a complete picture of a gloomy and forbidding
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 world in which the poor rushed to destruction until 
 they had learnt to know better through imitating the 
 class above them. 
 
 This atmosphere of reproach founded on the doctrine 
 of original sin, and tempered with coffee, buns and 
 heartiness, subtly pervaded the club in pleasing con- 
 trast to the world without. As a safeguard and defence 
 against the world, which as every one at University 
 Hall was continually dinning into their ears, was incre- 
 dibly wicked, the boys were treated at the club as if 
 they were wrapped in cotton-wool. 
 
 At least that was the ideal. It was rarely realized 
 that the ordinary, healthily indecent talk of boys be- 
 tween sixteen and twenty, driven underground by the 
 black looks of Clandon and others of his kidney, derived 
 strength and interest from the importance attached to 
 it, and took unto itself all the added glamour of stolen 
 apples. 
 
 As for drink, the fact that you could not get it or talk 
 about it at the club simply meant that you went to 
 the pub instead. Surely, thought Pramp, if drink is 
 accessible at four places out of every five, what is the 
 good of forbidding it at the fifth and calling yourself 
 virtuous ? By shoo-ing it out over your doorstep and 
 then pretending it does not exist, you are only encour- 
 aging it to take up its abode next door with women 
 thrown in, at the cost of making yourself cantankerous 
 and unpleasant to the members of the club. 
 
 Pramp, however, was not yet ripe for revolt. His 
 behaviour improved at the club, and he even lost some 
 of his popularity by trying to divest his jokes of some of 
 their sexual and alcoholic spice. But his cardinal fault 
 remained : he would try to get to know the boys. 
 
 And this was unusual to a reprehensible degree. It 
 
 49 D
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 may be that the claims of friendship with the Almighty 
 are too all-absorbing to permit a wide circle of earthly 
 friends. For the embryo curate does not know his 
 flock. He views them from the outside as the corpus vile 
 of his profession, but he does not know them. It isn't 
 done, as Clandon was careful to point out to Pramp. 
 " We are pioneers," he told him. " We are trying to 
 bridge the gulf that separates the rich from the poor. 
 But to do this we must not identify ourselves with the 
 poor. Then we should be of the poor ourselves, and 
 where would be the value of the bridge ? " 
 
 " But you talk of friendship," said Pramp. " You 
 even invite the more deserving to tea at University 
 Hall ; and you work among them." 
 
 " Yes, that is what we are here for, to work : to work 
 and to help." 
 
 " But you are so selective, you only help the boys." 
 
 " Not always ! Some of us who are older try to help 
 the women. We support them through the periodical 
 arrivals of new babies or drunken husbands. It is no 
 light matter, I assure you. The women are so secretive, 
 so defensive. No ! we get little thanks for doing God's 
 work in the East End." 
 
 " But don't you find all this practical work bad for 
 your mind ? If you are up to your eyes in good works, 
 they become blind to everything else : to beauty or 
 friendship, for instance." 
 
 " Oh, we've no time for women ! And as to friend- 
 ship, there are the boys. You can't think, Pramp, how 
 close you get to them." 
 
 " But you don't ! You tell me yourself that real 
 intimacy with boys would destroy the value of your 
 work your bridge. Besides, you are too busy helping 
 them : and you are too English and public schoolly
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 really to mix ; you want to keep yourselves to your- 
 selves, to preserve your middle-class integrity. All 
 your lives you have gone round the vicious circle of 
 acquaintances tinctured with relations. You don't 
 make friends. How should you ? Friendship requires 
 perseverance, forbearance, practice, not a mere doing 
 of things." 
 
 " You don't know what you are saying ; we love our 
 boys. We visit them when they are sick, we bail them 
 out when they are in trouble. We are always working 
 and watching over them." 
 
 Pramp too was working and watching. Borne along 
 in the stream of well-doing, he bestowed the light of 
 benevolent cheeriness and an Oxford manner on a large 
 hospital, a police court, a lunatic asylum and Worm- 
 wood Scrubbs prison in the space of a week. The 
 visit to Wormwood Scrubbs was the only one he 
 found at all tolerable, because he was not expected to 
 make cheerful conversation with the prisoners. 
 
 It was not that he could not talk, but he could not talk 
 about the right things. He was always treading on the 
 thin ice of forbidden topics, and as he was still mortally 
 afraid of going through into the waters of Clandon's 
 displeasure, he tried to keep his mouth shut. 
 
 It was, however, with a feeling of deliberate revolt 
 and challenge that he promised one night to sing at a 
 concert to be given by the club " Magpies " on the 
 following evening ; for no University man had ever 
 sung for one of the club concert troops before. 
 
 Pramp contrived to keep the thing carefully con- 
 cealed from Clandon and the rest until the night of the 
 performance. 
 
 Singing, of course, in any and every company, at all 
 places and all times, had been one of the most important
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 doctrines inculcated into Pramp at Oxford. But like 
 so many men who had been to Keble and thought it was 
 Oxford, Clandon and Simmonds did not know this. 
 The accent of their words was Oxford, but the words 
 were Keble, while the songs were not at all. Clandon 
 thought it undignified to sing before the boys. Sim- 
 monds, who was, as has been remarked, very High 
 Church, was inclined to the view that all singing outside 
 churches was to be deprecated. 
 
 That a University Hall man should stand up on a 
 stage and entertain boys by making an exhibition of 
 himself, thereby showing that he liked to excite affec- 
 tion and applause among his inferiors, was incompre- 
 hensible to them. Now the incomprehensible was 
 synonymous with the abominable, for they possessed 
 all the keen critical faculty of their class. 
 
 The Club Hall was crowded to the last inch on the 
 night of the concert. The " Magpies " were closeted in 
 a little room behind the stage, Pramp, anxious to allay 
 all suspicion until his turn came, sitting ostentatiously 
 talking to a mob of boys at the back of the hall. 
 
 The songs of the " Magpies " were almost entirely 
 music-hall comics, which, being about a year old, had 
 just filtered through to the East End. "Oh, you 
 Beautiful Doll" and " Have a bit of Jam Jim, Jim Jam, 
 Jam Jim," evoked great applause and thunderous 
 singings of the chorus. 
 
 To the surprise of Pramp and apparently every one 
 else one singer came out with" Good-bye, my Bluebell," 
 which, dating from the days of the Boer War, was unani- 
 mously voted stale, and was held to constitute a blot 
 upon the otherwise up-to-date escutcheon of the 
 " Magpies." 
 
 On the other hand, an indescribably sentimental
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 ballad of a somewhat later period wrung many heart- 
 strings. The chorus of the song, which was something 
 on these lines 
 
 " I wonder if you miss me sometimes, 
 Miss me when the twilight's nigh ; 
 I wonder, dear, if sometimes you remember 
 Days gone by. 
 
 I wonder if you know I'm pining, 
 Pining for you in despair, 
 I wonder if you know my heart is breaking, 
 And I wonder if you care " 
 
 brought tears to many eyes, although it evoked feelings 
 of apprehension among some owing to the intrusion 
 of the feminine element. 
 
 It was huskily chanted by several hundred voices, as 
 though clear enunciation, involving a raising of the 
 voice, would have been the grossest sacrilege, and 
 produced a most moving effect. 
 
 At the close of the subsequent subdued applause the 
 leader of the " Magpies " announced in a few brief words 
 that Mr. Pramp, of University Hall, had kindly con- 
 sented to favour the audience with a song, and inti- 
 mated that Mr. Pramp would now oblige. 
 
 Pramp got up, marched along the length of the hall, 
 amid tumultuous cheering and cries of " Good old 
 Pramp," " He's the lad he is," and mounted the stage. 
 
 In the front row immediately below him he could 
 see the astonished Clandon glowering disapproval, and 
 frowning as if he wanted to amalgamate his eyebrows. 
 
 Pramp began by delivering a short homily on the 
 song he proposed to sing, " Jonah and the Whale," 
 alluding briefly to the well-known work in which the 
 character of Jonah was introduced, and giving a short 
 
 53
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 and racy resume of the story, in which Jonah figured 
 as " our honoured but lugubrious friend." 
 The song itself was as follows 
 
 1st Verse. Who did, who did, who did, who did, who did, who did 
 
 swallow Jonah ? (repeated three times), Swallow Jonah 
 
 down. 
 2nd Verse. Whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley 
 
 swallowed Jonah (repeated three times), Swallowed Jonah 
 
 down. 
 3rd Verse. Why did, why did, why did, why did, why did whaley 
 
 swallow Jonah (repeated three times), Swallow Jonah down ? 
 4th Verse. Whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley very 
 
 hung, hung (repeated three times), Very hungry. 
 5th Verse. Why did, why did, why did, why did, why did whaley 
 
 throw up Jonah ? (repeated three times), Throw-ow Jonah 
 
 up ? 
 
 6th Verse. Jonah dance and kick and pray, and kick and pray in 
 
 whaley's turn turn (repeated three times), In whaley's tummy. 
 
 yth Verse. Whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley, whaley very 
 
 sick, sick (repeated three times), Very sick indeed. 
 
 Now this song, when you hear it done, is very funny. 
 Only once has it been known to fail, and that was in 
 a Southsea boarding-house. But it must have the 
 proper lugubrious accompaniment, and must receive 
 proper "'histrionic treatment, necessitating many 
 changes of voice and much realism of gesture from 
 the singer. 
 
 On this occasion the effect was stupendous. 
 
 Whether it was that the song constituted something 
 of a challenge to that repressive pietism and niceness of 
 taste, with which University Hall men had hitherto 
 been identified, or whether it was the fact that for the 
 first time in the history of the club a song had been 
 sung by a University Hall man, or whether it was the 
 exuberantly flippant attitude of Pramp, or simply the 
 intrinsic merits of the song, or whether it was all of 
 
 54
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 these combined or some of them only, the result was 
 that the house rose as one man, Clandon and Simmonds 
 having no better inspiration on the spur of the moment 
 following suit and encored Pramp rapturously. 
 
 Pramp was ready enough to give an encore ; had, in 
 fact, arranged it beforehand. 
 
 His encore was to be the famous Officers Training 
 Corps song called " Old King Cole." This song gives 
 samples of the typical remarks of the various ranks in 
 the military hierarchy. No song goes with a greater 
 lilt ; no song possesses a more infectious tune ; and 
 the chorus, which is irresistible, runs as follows 
 
 " Beer, beer, beer, said the private. 
 Merry, merry men are we ; 
 There's none so fair that can compare 
 With the boys of the O.T.C." 
 
 Now, if Pramp thought at all about the matter, it 
 would have seemed to him that this song was less likely 
 to cause offence than the last. " Jonah and the 
 Whale " might conceivably be regarded as treating 
 sacred subjects in a frivolous light. But the " Boys of 
 the O.T.C.," besides appealing to that well-known 
 sentiment of reciprocal affection between those allied 
 institutions, the Church and the Army (have not the 
 pulpit and the trench come to be regarded as the only 
 alternative professions for those sons of the middle 
 classes who are not thought gifted enough for stock- 
 broking ?), made fun of nothing in particular, but was 
 just a right-down straightforward sort of good hearty 
 song, with delicacy enough even to leave blanks for the 
 major's swearing. In insisting that it is a delicate song 
 enough, I pass by the equivocal interpretations which 
 have been suggested by some of the somewhat ambigu- 
 
 55
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 ous exhortation of the quartermaster " to slap it up 
 and down on the wall." 
 
 But luck fought against Pramp that night. 
 
 It so happened that at that period a song, unknown 
 to Pramp, was well-known to his audience. The 
 chorus began 
 
 " Beer, beer, glorious beer, fill yourselves right up to 
 here " (the paunch being indicated), etc. 
 
 This song, needless to say, was rigorously banned at 
 the club. 
 
 But the appearance of a University Hall man singing 
 a song which went so far as to mention the beverage 
 three times in a chorus, though without panegyrical 
 epithet, was sufficient apparently to subvert the bonds 
 of discipline. 
 
 Once Pramp got to " Beer, beer, beer, said the 
 Private," the effect on the audience was magical. 
 They went right off the rails with the song, captured 
 it and made it their own, and, despite stentorian 
 efforts on the part of Pramp and a thumping accom- 
 paniment by the pianist, insisted on singing instead the 
 chorus of the more familiar song which spoke of beer 
 and nothing but beer, sang it, howled it, and sang it 
 three times over, before Pramp could get hearing 
 enough to continue with his next verse. 
 
 For four verses Pramp struggled on with his song, 
 the babel-like chorus of " beer, beer, glorious beer " 
 recurring with increased strength and frequency on 
 each occasion. 
 
 Then he gave it up in despair and retired discom- 
 forted, though the applause was tumultuous. The 
 audience broke up in a hubbub. The boys rushed 
 about excitedly shouting for beer and cheering Pramp, 
 who, appalled at the effect of his singing, modestly 
 
 56
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 tried to evade notice by keeping as much as possible 
 out of the way. The solvent beer, by its mere men- 
 tion, appeared to have loosened restraint and cast 
 respect to the winds. 
 
 Clandon vainly endeavoured to restore some kind of 
 order ; but he could scarcely make his voice heard 
 above the din. With a few exceptions the boys paid 
 no attention to his attempts to exert his authority. 
 One or two, boding the storm which was to follow, 
 attempted to curry favour in advance by ostentatiously 
 forming a little ring round Clandon and Simmonds, as 
 if they expected them to be personally assaulted. They 
 could be heard saying that " they didn't think Mr. 
 Pramp ought to have sung a song like that in the club. 
 He oughtn't really." " It wasn't right of Mr. Pramp." 
 They " couldn't understand how he came to do it, 
 especially him being a College gentleman," and so 
 on. 
 
 But these were but a few voices of dissent among the 
 riot of approval and gladness. Pramp with difficulty 
 escaped being chaired back to University Hall, by 
 taking refuge in the lavatory, whereupon the boys, to 
 mark their disappointment, immediately left the club. 
 They did not even stay to say good night to Clandon. 
 This was the severest slight of all, for Clandon's good 
 night, involving a firm shake of the hand and deep look 
 into the eyes, amounted almost to a benediction ; it 
 was a sort of rite. With the faithful Simmonds at his 
 side, he locked up the club in a boding and sinister 
 silence. 
 
 As they walked back together Pramp had gone on 
 ahead " That fellow wants a good talking to," said 
 Simmonds. 
 
 " He wants more than that," replied Clandon 
 
 57
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " He must go. He shall never, never enter my club 
 again. If he does, I resign." 
 
 On returning to University Hall it might have been 
 observed that Clandon was closeted in close com- 
 munion for a considerable time with the Chief. 
 
 About eleven o'clock on the following morning Pramp 
 was asked to go to the Chief's private room. He went 
 there and found the Chief standing on the hearthrug, 
 legs apart, clerical coat tails gathered up behind his 
 back, with Clandon and Simmonds in two big arm- 
 chairs one on each side of the fire. 
 
 Bloomfield, the Chief of University Hall, was in 
 many ways a remarkable man. He had taken a first- 
 class degree at Oxford, and had cut a prominent figure 
 as a violent revolutionary. In his own words, " he had 
 drunk blood," and had made Keble College, notorious 
 for its distrust of the disturbing effects of any kind of 
 thought, almost too hot to hold him. 
 
 On leaving Oxford he had taken a post as private 
 secretary to an eminent barrister and politician and 
 seemed well on the way to the House of Commons, for 
 which his talents eminently fitted him, when something 
 in the nature of a Pauline conversion appears to have 
 happened to him. 
 
 At all events Bloomfield threw up barrister and 
 politics alike, took Orders, and set his feet to the thorny 
 path of a High Church curate in Poplar. 
 
 He was lifted from the ruck of East End ecclesiastics 
 by the gift of speech and an Episcopal uncle. The 
 first helped his sermons to get into people's heads ; the 
 second, into print. He became known. 
 
 Charming manners and an appreciable watering down 
 of his undergraduate, political heterodoxy brought 
 him into favour with priest and layman. His early 
 
 58
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 revolutionary sympathies were now of great use to 
 him, providing him with a formidable array of anec- 
 dotes derogatory to the characters and disinterested- 
 ness of leaders of Labour, and a thorough acquaintance 
 with the weak points in the anatomy of the gods of 
 atheism and socialism. He possessed an unexampled 
 knowledge of the weak points in the armour of tub 
 thumpers and secularists, which were most vulnerable to 
 the satiric clerical shaft. He could plumb the shallows 
 of a Socialist speech, and was able to retort with devasta- 
 ting effect upon poor men who spoke of revolution, 
 " Yes, I thought that too when I was younger. But 
 experience has made me alter my views." 
 
 But reflection would ascribe the chief element in his 
 success to the skill with which he selected for his 
 eloquent attacks precisely those movements and ten- 
 dencies which happened to be most unpopular at the 
 moment. Materialists, socialist agitators, secular 
 Sabbatarians, brewers and landlords figured in turn in 
 the pillory of his pulpit, and were duly disposed of. 
 
 He retained, however, from his early intellectualist 
 associations a taste for argument, which gave him a 
 fine show of open-mindedness and enabled him fiercely 
 to discuss, without of course admitting, views whose 
 acceptance would abolish alike the justification of his 
 existence and his salary. 
 
 It was this assumption of broad-mindedness that 
 chiefly marked him off from his brother clerics. He 
 did not pretend that improper views did not exist 
 simply because they were not his own. He kept up-to- 
 date with the most recent forms of heterodoxy and 
 beat them off the field, thus exhibiting an open- 
 minded modernity which was creditable to the intelli- 
 gence with which he pursued his ambitions. 
 
 59
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " I want to have a word or two with you, Mr. 
 Pramp," he began now, " on a rather serious matter. 
 I do not know with what intentions you came to 
 University Hall. Your actions would seem to show 
 that they were not particularly creditable ones ; but 
 I will place the most generous interpretation on them 
 that I can, and try to regard them as thoughtless and 
 ill-advised merely. You know, of course, to what I 
 refer ? " 
 
 Pramp said that he did not, and with a look of 
 regretful surprise as much as to say, " I see, you un- 
 scrupulous young devil, you're going to brazen it out 
 with a show of innocence, are you ? " Mr. Bloomfield 
 continued 
 
 " You are doubtless aware, Mr. Pramp, that it has 
 always been our greatest endeavour in the University 
 Hall clubs to encourage temperance and self-restraint, 
 and to do everything in our power to discountenance 
 drink and the praises of it. Only teetotal drinks are, of 
 course, sold in the clubs, and the subject of drinking 
 has always been strictly barred in conversation by 
 University Hall men. For all the mention of it that 
 has ever been made in the clubs, at least to our know- 
 ledge, no member might have known that such a thing 
 as intoxicating liquor existed. That spirit, you will 
 understand, Mr. Pramp, is something which cannot be 
 lightly come by. It has taken many years to build up ! 
 
 " Very well ! You write to me from Oxford and ask 
 to be admitted into University Hall. We open our 
 doors to you in perfect good faith, and give you access 
 to our clubs, which you enter with all the prestige and 
 influence that attaches to a University Hall man. 
 
 " You were tacitly put upon your honour to main- 
 tain that prestige and influence and to behave in the 
 
 60
 
 DABBLING IN THE SLUMS 
 
 way in which University Hall men always have behaved. 
 How did you use this influence, how did you honour 
 this privilege ? 
 
 " You used it to undermine all that University 
 Hall has stood for, all that it has been endeavouring to 
 achieve. You take down the banner of University 
 Hall the banner of purity and temperance you 
 cover it with ridicule and trample it in the dust. You 
 question our prohibitions with regard to talk of sex and 
 drink. You aim at everything which will win you a 
 cheap and easy popularity, and you do it by making 
 light of the rules of the clubs. You egg the boys on 
 by precept and example to set at nought the authority 
 of our men. You alienate their affections from the 
 manager of the club, who has made the club what it is, 
 and as a culminating performance you appear at a club 
 concert, itself an unprecedented thing for a University 
 Hall man, and sing a song which glorifies and exalts the 
 one thing the club has always endeavoured to suppress. 
 Mr. Pramp, you have undone in one week, in one night 
 even, the work of several years ! 
 
 " As I said, I do not know what your intentions may 
 have been. I hope that I am justified in ascribing 
 your actions to foolishness merely. But you have 
 many lessons yet to learn before you can begin to hope 
 to do any useful work in the East End. You have 
 even more to unlearn. 
 
 " The man who wishes to work in the East End must 
 approach his task in humbleness of spirit. He must not 
 seek continually to thrust himself into the limelight of 
 popularity, which his superior education and social 
 standing can so easily procure him among boys who are 
 prone to cultivate and worship what they think is above 
 them. It is, for instance, easy for him to indulge 
 
 61
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 their predilection for loose talking, by painting in 
 attractive colours things against which the club must 
 always set its face. Yet he must not do this. He must 
 think always of how to better, not how to please, the 
 boys under his charge. He must talk on subjects which 
 will interest their minds and not indulge their tastes. 
 Above all, he must pray to God for strength to set 
 himself rigorously against the all too easy path of the 
 middle-class demagogue. 
 
 " Mr. Pramp, you have these and many other things 
 to learn. Your conduct has made it impossible for you 
 to learn them here. In a few years' time you may 
 perhaps come back. At present this is not the place 
 for you." 
 
 " But what have I ? " broke in Pramp. 
 
 But Mr. Bloomfield was too good an arguer to waste 
 his talents in arguing with inferiors. 
 
 " We need not prolong this conversation, Mr. 
 Pramp. I have said all I have to say, and I can't listen 
 to any arguments. Good-bye." 
 
 And that was the finish of the East End as a career 
 for Pramp. He passed out of University Hall with 
 diminished head, and the world of social workers knew 
 him no more. 
 
 62
 
 Chapter 2 : A Glimpse of Bohemia 
 
 " ^T^HE trouble about life at Oxford," said 
 J. Lowther, " is that you never get to know 
 anybody." 
 
 " What rot," replied Pramp ; " one knows simply 
 stacks of people. The difficulty is to get them all in." 
 
 " That's just it. It is because you can't get 
 them all in, as you so elegantly phrase it, that you 
 don't really know them. It takes ages to get to 
 know one man, and here one is acquainted with so 
 many that you don't give a consecutive ten minutes 
 to any of them. Besides, you don't take the trouble 
 to be civil to people when you know you can so easily 
 replace them if they take offence. You only value 
 things which are irreplaceable." 
 
 " Oh, is that what you mean ? Why couldn't 
 you say so without being so sententious about it ? 
 Well, what about it, anyway ? What is the remedy ? " 
 
 " To go on a reading party. Get four or five 
 people together, whom you think you might like if 
 you got to know them, and go off to a remote spot 
 where you can neither get away from them nor 
 exchange them. Of course, when you really found 
 out what they were like, you might be disappointed, 
 but that's a risk you've got to take. Besides, you 
 would find out something about yourself : that is the 
 chief object of friendship, to reveal a man to himself." 
 
 63
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " You talk as though seeing a man out of Oxford 
 meant seeing a different man." 
 
 " Well, doesn't it ? The conditions here are 
 unnatural : the stream of life too fast ; the atmo- 
 sphere is congested, overcharged, like the climate." 
 
 " You mean ? " 
 
 " That the climate of Oxford is like a damp 
 bathroom, that its spiritual atmosphere is like a 
 mental hothouse, and that you can't discover a man's 
 complexion if you have only seen him in a conser- 
 vatory. Review him in the cold light of the outside 
 world and you may make a friend. But the glare 
 must not be too pitiless. It would never do to see 
 Archie, for instance, in Bootle. But transplant him 
 to the country to Brittany, for example ! " 
 
 " What about Brittany ? " said Pramp. 
 
 " Two years ago I was biking with my father in 
 the obscurer parts of the C6tes-du-Nord. We 
 came upon a little island, with about five hundred 
 people on it, a mile or so from the coast. Good hotel, 
 empty in June or July, cooking excellent, Madame 
 complaisant, I mean about omelettes and things. 
 The people, by the way, are practically all women : 
 the men, it seems, are away fishing in Iceland or some- 
 where. At any rate we never saw any, except a few 
 artists from Paris. And they might have been women ! " 
 
 " Let's go," said Pramp, " this summer vac. ! " 
 
 The chosen six were to cross directly term was 
 over, with the exception of Pramp. He was pledged 
 to a week at the Lads' Club Camp. How he fared 
 there we have already seen. 
 
 He arrived at Southampton for the crossing on a 
 burning July day, and boarded the ship about four 
 o'clock after the usual bickering with his father
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 for having lost all his luggage, which his father must be 
 at the expense and trouble of forwarding. 
 
 " So selfish of you, Arthur, to put all this trouble 
 upon other people, simply because you won't take the 
 pains to look after your own stuff yourself." 
 
 His father bade him a perfunctory good-bye inter- 
 mingled with admonitions as to the proper manipula- 
 tion of French coinage, and turned away before the 
 ship left, betraying unusual sensibility in the avoid- 
 ance of that gloomy hiatus between scheduled and 
 actual time of departure, a blank to be filled with 
 vacant gaze or conversation on meals, landings, 
 stewards, sea sickness, mechanically manufactured, 
 publishable every word. 
 
 Pramp was glad to be going to France. He had 
 only been there once before, a boy of fourteen with his 
 family. His stomach had protested at the unknown 
 food ; he had fallen ill, and returned in a fortnight. His 
 experiences of France were mainly olfactory, and his 
 ignorance alike of the language and the land invested 
 the place with what must be described as the glamour 
 of adventure. Also he had heard vaguely of French 
 women. 
 
 On the quay of St. Malo with its olfactory reminis- 
 cences he discovered he had no time for breakfast if 
 he wanted to catch his train, also that he knew less 
 French even than he had thought. The meagre 
 remnants of French grammar still surviving in his 
 brain, his memory of the nouns ending in " ail " 
 which made plural in " x," and those again which were 
 partial to " s," an unpronouncable word which some- 
 times meant a stained-glass window and sometimes 
 something else, were so much useless dross upon the 
 platform of Dinard station. 
 
 65 B
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 He entrained, however, for Paimpol, and discovered 
 that the amenities of the Quest Etat included four 
 changes and nine hours to perform the requisite 
 hundred miles. 
 
 Archie and Waller met him at Paimpol. They 
 boarded a little motor vedette, rounded the harbour 
 point and the island lay full to view, a vista of trees 
 and rocks and cliffs and little white houses standing 
 out among the green. 
 
 The time that followed was happily masculine : a 
 time of work and bathing, of bridge and billiards, of 
 cricket and talk; a time, above all, of talk. 
 
 An unprecedented freedom of expression and irre- 
 verence of thought, upon which a milieu of uncom- 
 prehending Frenchmen placed no restraint, lent to 
 conversation a peculiar zest. 
 
 The best talk comes from a stimulation, not of mind, 
 but of body. Nothing untrammels the tongue like a 
 good dinner, but the constant supervision of vigilant 
 and understanding inferiors for Hebes in England pro- 
 vides a makeweight of stiffness. Here the excellence 
 of the diet piqued the wit ; the ears of the servitors 
 were shut ; neither God, man, woman or clergyman 
 escaped scathing treatment at the merciless hands of 
 youth, emphatically modern in its ability to penetrate 
 shams, but not the superficiality of its own penetration. 
 
 Ball gave the gathering its tone. He possessed an 
 intellect that worked like a fretsaw, cutting, pigeon- 
 holing, cataloguing and Bowdlerizing whatever was 
 presented to it, but lacking the originality to provide 
 materials for its own vivisection. His extraordinarily 
 clear brain and a certain amount of application at 
 school had won for him practically every distinction 
 that the modern public school offers to the intelligent 
 
 66
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 who lack athletics. This culminated in the first 
 scholarship at Balliol, where a series of University 
 prizes and exhibitions, culled indiscriminately, had 
 combined to inflate his pride and his pocket. A sceptic 
 by nature he had rapidly knocked the bottom out of 
 every theory, religion, convention or belief that had 
 had the ill-luck to come under his notice. Having 
 effectively scrapped the universe in theory, he had now 
 arrived at the youthful conclusion that the really 
 intelligent position, affording invulnerable armour for 
 controversial purposes, was to have no views. He was 
 propagandist only in this, that disbelieving in every- 
 thing himself he was eager to reduce others to a simi- 
 larly interesting state. Aunts said of him, " He wants 
 to fall in love with a really good woman. That will 
 cure him." Conceive the aunts, and you have the man. 
 Unfortunately for the aunts' peace of mind, his views 
 on women were as primitively masculine as his practice 
 was innocuous. A sensualist, he had not the courage of 
 his desires ; but perhaps a good woman, if fallen in love 
 with, cures even views on women. 
 
 On the question of women, it may be noted that 
 the timidity engendered by cloistered life at a Univer- 
 sity induced them all to cry sour grapes. Women 
 were for them not desirable, not because they were not 
 desired, but because they were not attained. They 
 feared to display the gaucheries of their novitiate and 
 wished not to appear ridiculous, not knowing that if a 
 thing is worth doing at all it is worth doing badly. 
 This indeed they knew as regards skating, diving, riding 
 and painting, in which preliminary awkwardnesses are 
 surmounted for the sake of the skill to come ; but love 
 they set apart, failing to recognize it as a pursuit, at 
 best an art, of which the initial stages must be laboured
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 through with as much assiduity and clumsiness as mark 
 the pothooks and hangers of the youth of tender years, 
 soon to develop into handwriting. Ball's vast know- 
 ledge of the literature of love, of Rabelais, of Bocaccio, 
 of Gil Bias and of Balzac's Contes Drolatiques made him 
 only the more painfully aware of his own in experience. 
 
 Lowther had a heart and more insight, which com- 
 bined to blunt the lucidity and to modify the crudity 
 of his views, which otherwise resembled Ball's. 
 
 Archie, very pink, flaxen-haired, handsome and nine- 
 teen, was for taking refuge in mysticism and the outer 
 fringes of religion. 
 
 " A state of belief," he said one night, " is not 
 necessarily valueless because you can't understand it. 
 Its merit lies rather in the fact that it does baffle the 
 understanding, like good music. You get so sick of 
 being able to understand things. That is what's wrong 
 with the Merry Widow Waltz, or Dixie Land, or the 
 poems of the woman Wilcox. You can't rest in them 
 because you can see through them." 
 
 " But religions are just the same. I can't find any 
 religions that are incomprehensible," said Lowther. 
 " You can see through them all. They are either 
 dodges for fleecing the poor, or for killing and torturing 
 people under the pretext of executing God's will." 
 
 " What about theosophy and mysticism generally ; 
 they take no money from anyone, nor do they prosely- 
 tize ? " 
 
 " I've no patience with them," said Ball. " Theo- 
 sophy and mysticism are God's last ditch. The 
 Godmen, defeated on the orthodox count, take refuge 
 in these hothouse creeds and wreathe themselves in a 
 nebulous mist of elusive phraseology. They are like 
 the cuttlefish emitting the ink, or whatever it is they 
 
 68
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 do emit, to cover up their traces and mislead those who 
 try to follow them. The stuff they talk doesn't mean 
 anything to them, but they don't mind that as long as 
 it doesn't mean anything to their opponents either. 
 Then they can't be attacked. It's just the same about 
 women. The secret of their charm is that men profess 
 they can't understand them. That's why men make 
 fools of themselves over them just as they do over 
 religion." 
 
 " Of course it's easy enough to see that men make 
 fools of themselves over women," said Pramp, " but it 
 is not so easy to see why, until you've tried. That's 
 what's wrong with us. We are always talking about 
 women and never trying them. Women aren't here 
 to be understood or not understood. They're here to 
 be loved." 
 
 ". Oscar Wilde ! " said Waller. " Why don't you go 
 and do it then ? " 
 
 Just then Marie, the bonne, came out into the 
 veranda where they fed, with the omelette. Pramp 
 had curly hair, and she was fond of running her fingers 
 through it. She did so now, and her fingers were 
 very greasy. Pramp shied some bread at her. The 
 feeling he always had in this place of consciously aping 
 the pothouse plus literary attitudes of the eighteenth 
 century was particularly pleasing. Surely this was the 
 sort of thing Fielding used to do. 
 
 She laughed. " Vous venez danser ce soir ? " 
 
 " Mais oui. Vous danserez avec moi ? " he cried. 
 
 " Bien sur que oui," and she left them. 
 
 " Now you've done it," said Lowther. " Go and 
 love her." 
 
 " I'll have a shot," said Pramp. " That's more than 
 you've got the guts for."
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Regularly at half-past eight the island's half-wit 
 struck up with concertina in the " Place." Couples 
 came and danced, danced simply none of your 
 modern clinging form to form, but jigging at arms' 
 length, with only eyes and hands for bond. There 
 was much free merriment, a safety valve for animal, 
 not for sensual, spirits. 
 
 Pramp had watched from his window, often cursing 
 himself as a coward for not having the courage of his 
 longings, oftener for having them, for some traces of 
 the sternly-minded young man with mission to improve 
 still lingered. To-night he watched on the veranda 
 till silence supervened in the kitchen on the clatter oT 
 knives, forks and dishes first in action, then in process 
 of being washed up. 
 
 Marie came out. A French girl, she achieved, with 
 white silk scarf thrown over her head, an effect that 
 baffles the English servant tribe with expensive outlay 
 on hats, feathers and fans. But her olfactory appeal 
 was inferior. She smelt of garlic. Pramp, however, 
 was impervious alike to garlic and rugged hands. 
 
 The steps of a Breton dance are very difficult. 
 Pramp's ineptitude was great, but Marie's patience 
 was greater. Her pride in her capture was greater 
 still. He danced with none other, but so many of 
 the dances were round, involving contact with at 
 least a dozen maidens, that Marie expressed jealous 
 fears and loudly claimed possession. 
 
 French girls are masters of eye craft ; the eyes of 
 Marie swung and veered like a well-oiled compass 
 with Pramp for magnetic pole. But he was still too 
 much of a striver, too much the young man of serious 
 endeavour to be content with the lowest rung of the 
 amorous ladder. He carried Marie off for a walk. 
 
 70
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 To his delight the dreaded necessity of demanding a 
 kiss was superfluous. Marie's eyes anticipated the 
 demand and skipped it, and he found his lips at last 
 performing their other function. 
 
 She sat on his knee, his hands clasped her, and 
 wandered. Later, still in the role of the adventurous 
 voyager, he made bold to ask her to visit him that 
 night. She promised, and at midnight a hectic 
 Pramp sat on his bed feverishly listening for foot- 
 steps. He had never really expected her, but found 
 his disappointment growing as his expectations de- 
 creased, and cursed the faithlessness of women with all 
 the conventional disillusionment of an old hand. He 
 passed a broken night, astonished to find the helpless- 
 ness of what he considered a keen intellect to master 
 feeling. 
 
 The following day brought reaction, which never 
 became remorse. He continued to kiss and flirt with 
 Marie frequently, and this gave him an exaggerated 
 sense of superiority to the others, who professed an 
 amused contempt at his dalliance. He read great 
 quantities of literature, absorbing the major part of 
 Shaw and Wells in the next month. As a result he 
 became a Socialist and was left high and dry on the 
 shore of an arid intellectualism with the last traces 
 of his Christianity washed away, and a keen desire to 
 write. He discussed a proposed novel at table. 
 Lowther laughed unrestrainedly at the suggestion. 
 
 " Everything that you could do has already been 
 done ad nauseam" he said. " You could only describe 
 the middle class family and the revolt of its offspring 
 against convention and Victorianism ; that's all you 
 talk about." 
 
 " You haven't an original idea in your head," said
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Ball. " After your first novel, which would be auto- 
 biography, you could only plagiarize Wells. Of course 
 that's quite easy. Gas vaguely about muddle in 
 politics and the importance of order and taking hold, 
 spice it with a certain amount of sex stuff, pepper it 
 with epigrams to make it clever, and you have the 
 modern pseudo-intellectual novel." 
 
 " Why do you except the first novel ? ' : 
 
 " Because any man with an average amount of 
 intelligence who has been to the University and knows 
 the English language can write something that will 
 get called a novel, out of his own reminiscences. Begin 
 by sticking an epigram, preferably original, in the 
 middle of each page and tack them together with 
 enough padding to make them relevant, put in a few 
 women you have known and generalize about them, 
 exploit your own emotions, and put your passions in 
 the shop window, and there you are. In this way 
 every one can write one modern novel, or if he has a 
 double personality, two. No creation is needed." 
 
 Their assurance irritated Pramp, but when he tried 
 creative work one hot afternoon two days later he 
 proved completely barren and went 'to sleep. Two 
 articles written for the Daily Mail and an imitation of 
 A.A.M. for Punch, none of which were even returned, 
 were the net outcome and final excursions of his 
 literary fervour. 
 
 Creative work proving discouraging, he attacked 
 Plato's Republic with great avidity. 
 
 One by one the others left. Pramp and Lowther 
 were to stay on alone for a fortnight, at the end of which 
 time Pramp's father threatened to descend from Lon- 
 don with project of a bike tour. 
 
 For the first few days alone they wallowed in that 
 
 72
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 deliciously woeful feeling of self-conscious melancholy 
 that never fails to console the abandoned remnant of 
 a large party. Whether you remain at school when 
 the boys have left, or overstay a week-end party till 
 the Tuesday or Wednesday, or haunt Oxford in the 
 " vac.," the effect is invariably the same. One feeds 
 on reminiscences, visits the spots most richly stored 
 with memory, and thinks to have discovered one's own 
 soul always a delightful event. 
 
 The third day, on descending at cry of " a table, a 
 table " from books to dinner, they were intrigued and 
 embarrassed by sight of two new guests the first 
 since their arrival facing them at table. They 
 were intrigued because, two days of undiluted com- 
 panionship having exhausted conversation, the main- 
 stay of acquaintanceship, they had yet to gain their 
 second wind which breathes friendship and renders 
 silence tolerable : hence they were relieved by pro- 
 spect of fresh material for companionship and the 
 polishing of their French. They were embarrassed 
 at the strange aspect of the new-comers. 
 
 The man had eyes and hair. The former brown and 
 large enough in England to betray the poet or the 
 dreamer, but here betokening nothing in particular 
 unless it were belladonna, the latter curling in long 
 ringlets on to his shoulders : subsequent events proved 
 it no wig. Face pale, hands most delicate and be- 
 ringed, and suit of brown velvet induced them both 
 to label him spiritual inhabitant of a country, with a 
 population long since extinct, Bohemia. His voice, 
 rising to a stringy falsetto, might have enlightened 
 their inexperience. 
 
 His companion, a woman, seemed beautiful with 
 ample form and full lip. Her features were in shadow, 
 
 73
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 accentuated by a large hat. She had come straight 
 from her journey ; only a tinge of yellow for white 
 in her eyes, and nails berimmed with black at the 
 ends might have indicated her status and origin. 
 
 Their talk was the merest politeness, consisting of 
 inquiries as to route, trains and changing places on 
 the journey, and exclamations at the slowness of the 
 Quest Etat, the fatigue and heat of travelling, and 
 the incivility of porters. They had come from Paris. 
 
 After dinner the couple retired for a walk, with 
 elaborate bows and proffers of English cigarettes, a 
 luxury. The bonnes were in a state of clamorous 
 excitement about them, and speculated freely as to 
 whether their titles " Monsieur and Madame Barna " 
 had at any time been sanctioned by the law of the 
 land. 
 
 Lowther was manifestly stirred, drank more than 
 conduced to coolness, and later, in their rooms, spoke 
 of the lady as a Venus, a little florid perhaps, but 
 refined. Pramp's recently-acquired experience of 
 women prompted him to qualify these praises on the 
 ground of blowsiness and to affect the dubiously 
 superior. He, too, felt that the morrow was invested 
 with a new interest. 
 
 Conversation at lunch was more cordial : the lady, 
 it seemed, desired to swim, and Pramp was full of 
 information as to the best places. At dinner Monsieur 
 was found fortified with time-tables. He made an 
 announcement ; business connected with his property 
 took him suddenly to Paris. Madame would, of 
 course, stay behind. He was most distressed to go 
 away and leave Madame so soon after his arrival. 
 Madame would be a little lonely, but he hoped to 
 return in a few days. Would the young Englishmen 
 
 74
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 be so kind as to look after Madame he named her for 
 the first time Linette meanwhile ? 
 
 A little startled, Pramp and Lowther expressed 
 themselves as delighted. It was only later that they 
 remembered to indulge in perfunctory regrets at the 
 forced absence of Monsieur. 
 
 " Will you teach me to swim ? " said the lady at 
 once. 
 
 " Of course," they said, " and she would learn small 
 cricket and join them at their English tea." 
 
 " Oh yes ; she would become quite an English 
 squaw." 
 
 They were not present at Barna's departure, having 
 retired to discuss their new responsibility. They 
 took it seriously : Lowther was for teaching her to 
 catch a cricket ball English fashion, and Pramp won- 
 dered if she could be instructed in the English language. 
 What was more important to him just then was that 
 she should instruct him in the language of love. He 
 had had enough of theory : he wanted practice. 
 
 Lowther advised caution. " Don't be a damned 
 fool," he said. " You'll get snubbed, and she'll go 
 bleating to her husband. Or perhaps you'll find her 
 too willing ; she'll compromise you and still go 
 bleating to her husband." He vaguely indicated 
 blackmail. 
 
 " Oh ! of course it's a risk," said Pramp, " but one 
 must do something. We're always soaking in this 
 stuff about love, but we never do anything. I suppose 
 you've got a vague expectation at the back of your 
 mind that a woman will come to you of her own 
 accord one day while you are dreaming over your 
 pipe, and say c Love me.' She won't. It's the 
 penalty of being male that you've got to go and look 
 
 75
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 for her. You and I are libertines in literature and 
 monks in practice. I don't want to read another 
 word about other people's women, till I've found 
 out that there are women for me too." 
 
 " Well, go quietly. I think there's something 
 doing myself, but there's no need to rush it." 
 
 " Well, I'm prepared for the risk." Pramp had drunk 
 wine. " Why not ? If I do get into a mess, I'm pre- 
 pared to take the consequences. But I bet I don't. 
 There's too much of the middle class bourgeois about 
 me, to let me do anything imprudent. But it's about 
 time one had a shot. Life's so flat. Nothing ever 
 happens. We try to make believe that our discussions 
 and reading and all that are the real thing. Not a bit. 
 They are makeshifts. All the time they are preparing 
 us and training us for an event that never comes. 
 One must have one's own experience as a touchstone, 
 then you can measure other people's ; otherwise you 
 just float vaguely. That's why all our gas about love 
 and pleasure is so barren like an apple with no juice." 
 
 Pramp, undertaking a mission on behalf of verbose 
 but virgin undergraduates, began to regard himself in 
 a Crusader-like role. The thought of personal pleasure 
 did not seem to touch his prospective relations with 
 Madame. He was to embark upon a voyage of experi- 
 ence, as a duty. He grew sententious at the thought. 
 
 " Life," he went on, " may be regarded as a discip- 
 line or an opportunity. In the first case we shall be 
 obsessed by the oppressive gravity of our mistakes, in 
 the second by the glorious possibilities of our experi- 
 ments." 
 
 " Oh, dry up," said Lowther, and went to bed. 
 
 Both were a little startled when Madame suggested 
 almost directly after lunch the next day that they
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 should go to bathe. French people are accustomed to 
 treasure their digestions, works of art to be allowed 
 to realize themselves unhurried and unhindered, so 
 that for most a full three hours must elapse between 
 meal and immersion. 
 
 They delayed her for an hour, and then started for a 
 place where the water was known to be shallow, and 
 the bottom sandy. She could swim a little, she said, 
 but needed assistance. 
 
 On arriving they deposited her towel and costume 
 upon the beach behind a sheltering rock, and made 
 away to undress behind another. She showed sur- 
 prise. " Why do you leave me, ungallant men ? " she 
 said, and followed after. 
 
 Lowther, however, preferred privacy to the spectacle 
 of beauty disrobing. He betrayed the dour courage 
 of the Briton, impervious to blandishments, and strode 
 sternly to refuge round a jutting rock. Pramp 
 stayed to parley. He spoke of English propriety. " It 
 wasn't done " was the burden of his remarks ; but 
 feelings of primitive male disliking to have his privilege 
 of being the hunter usurped, rather than outraged 
 respectability, prompted him in the end to follow 
 Lowther, with sound of mocking laughter in his wake. 
 
 In the water it became apparent that " she swam a 
 little," only in imagination. She summoned Pramp 
 to support her and clung to him. But whatever may 
 be the claims of the bays of Naples or of Genoa to 
 be Love's potent fluid, a medium to accentuate the 
 passion, as the electric current of a boy's shocking coil 
 is keener in the basin of water, the colder Atlantic 
 fringing the island boasted no such simple. Pramp 
 felt cold as the sea, and disdained the caresses he knew 
 to be proffered. A woman's body felt in water and 
 
 77
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 bathing-dress turns the thoughts to cod, not Cupid. 
 
 The bathe finished and her toilette, seen to be of 
 the scantiest, blue dressing-gown, given to sagging, 
 and Breton shoes she spoke of a small cottage close 
 by, taken and furnished by M. Barna, whither they 
 intended moving on his return, and offered tea. 
 
 Should they go ? Pramp had resumed his theories 
 with his trousers, and with them the reflection that 
 they were still only theories. He was still eager to 
 materialize them. The cottage, at least, would give the 
 appearance and perhaps the reality of intimacy. 
 
 Lowther acquiesced, but spoke little. Unwilling 
 to admit that he had received a shock to his propriety, 
 an admission unknown as yet in the world's history, and 
 feeling the inevitable effects of such a shock, including 
 inability to talk, he made a virtue of his disinclination, 
 and assumed a boorish sullenness, clearly intended to 
 imply to the woman her sin against taste. He retired 
 to the drawing-room of the cottage, pretty and clean 
 enough, to study French magazines ; Linette prattled to 
 Pramp in the kitchen, and she was still in her dressing- 
 gown. 
 
 He scarce dared to ask her for a kiss : the question 
 seemed an insult to her readiness. Before he could 
 summon the courage she was at his lips. He held her 
 in his arms, as she kissed him passionately. Her eyes 
 glowed. Her dressing-gown fell away, revealing 
 her breast. He felt repelled, she was outstripping 
 him, but politeness and his Crusader's desire for experi- 
 ence forbade him to push her away. She pointed to 
 the sofa, but he to the open drawing-room door, and on 
 the pretext of seeing what Lowther was doing went 
 into the drawing-room and stayed there till Linette 
 brought in tea. 
 
 78
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 People do not read events in other people's eyes in 
 anything like so marked a degree as they are in litera- 
 ture supposed to do. But Lowther had heard noises, 
 and Pramp's pale face confirmed the obvious. It was 
 Pramp's turn to be shocked into silence, and Lowther 
 was obliged to assume a tea-table sociability by carry- 
 ing on a constrained discussion with Linette on French 
 literature. 
 
 She exhibited more knowledge than was to be ex- 
 pected, especially of Pierre Louys, Felix Champsard 
 and similar authors ; but her eyes were on Pramp, and 
 he, he was not even fascinated, simply frightened. He 
 longed to go. She seemed hurt at their somewhat 
 lame excuse about returning to work, but they left her. 
 
 Pramp described the incident to Lowther with a 
 wealth of detail on their way back. He could not 
 determine, he said, whether his feeling of revulsion 
 was stronger than his wonder at the feeling. Both 
 were strong. It was as though a child's desire for jam 
 had been nauseated by spoonfuls crammed into his 
 mouth to cloak an aperient powder. 
 
 Lowther reiterated the need for caution. They 
 must avoid the woman. 
 
 We only listen to advice when we cease to need it, the 
 fact that it appears rational to us being the measure of 
 its superfluity. Pramp's feelings rendered his friend's 
 admonitions unnecessary. Already he had visions of 
 an impending and vengeful Barna : the woman might, 
 probably would, do the Potiphar's wife trick. They 
 must concert a plan of action against her. 
 
 So ended the first episode of the Crusader, in a com- 
 plete facer for experience. 
 
 Dinner was strained to a degree. The woman shut 
 her eyes to what her intuition must have revealed, 
 
 79
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 took her stand on the intimacy of the kitchen instead of 
 on the formality of the dinner table, and caressed with 
 hand and voice. 
 
 It is difficult to check a woman's passion without 
 wounding her feelings, and both Pramp and Lowther 
 so hated giving pain that they would be sure to make 
 the lady suffer. 
 
 A sudden fall in the temperature whether of the 
 passions or the atmosphere, especially if amounting to 
 frost, requires that the objects upon whom the tem- 
 perature normally operates should receive delicate 
 handling and protection, be they women or water 
 pipes. Pramp lacked the requisite delicacy of touch ; 
 in other words, he failed to protect the water pipes, and 
 floods of tears ensued. She forced them to down- 
 right rudeness, and they had to state plainly that they 
 preferred to view the sunset alone. 
 
 For the next two days they snubbed her unmerci- 
 fully, until in Pramp an abatement of the shock re- 
 ceived masqueraded as a feeling of compunction at their 
 ungentlemanly conduct to a woman, and he began to 
 relent. 
 
 But she certainly was intolerable. The expert 
 rapidity with which she had skimmed the earlier stages 
 of desire had balked her of the later. She blamed her 
 too great experience, and finding it difficult to arouse 
 their sympathy for pretended injury received, grew 
 vindictive and fell to annoying. Quickly she probed 
 the limitations of " la flegme britannique." An 
 Englishman indulges in gaiety only in strictly regulated 
 doses, generally taken after meals : gaiety is for him 
 definitely a departure from the normal. But she 
 would have them always at frolic, would come behind 
 them writing, place her hands over their eyes or close 
 
 80
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 their books. An exasperated Lowther one day hurled 
 his book at her with intent to hurt : it missed, but 
 she scored an advantage in his manifest regret. She 
 descended to tricks which are obsolete outside prepara- 
 tory schools : salt was substituted for their sugar ; the 
 lid of the pepper-pot was unscrewed ; their slippers 
 were hidden, and their bathing-dresses sewn up. 
 
 A man is always at his worst when wrangling with 
 a woman ; he loathes the pettiness involved,, and is 
 eager to be done with it, but she willingly prolongs the 
 bout, finding in such strife her habitual element. 
 
 " When men live together," said Lowther, " they 
 mutually map out the corns on one another's feet, and 
 carefully tread between. But this damned woman 
 maps them with equal care for the joy of standing on 
 them. For rank bad taste she's unrivalled. She's a 
 choice flower of the Paris Whitechapel, whatever it is." 
 
 " I agree, but we are awfully Pharisaical about her, 
 not on the moral count but just snobbish, because her 
 manner grates and she eats peas with a knife." 
 
 " Well, why not ? We can't help our feelings. If 
 one has the misfortune of being born an aristocrat, one 
 should at least claim the privilege of being a snob." 
 
 " In compensation." 
 
 " Yes, because it's only our damned refinement 
 veneer, I know, but to be reckoned with that prevents 
 us from regarding her as just a woman and enjoying 
 her, instead of as an ill-bred drab." 
 
 " Another sample of the truth that Oxford is a 
 device for providing a man with expensive tastes 
 without the means of gratifying them. We spurn this 
 poor lady, but can't afford a better," said Pramp. 
 
 He made efforts to renew intimacy, but at every 
 approach his fear, refinement or whatever it was, inter- 
 Si r
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 vened. Fear is the greatest bulwark of chastity, and 
 was potent till Barna's return. 
 
 Linette either kept quiet on events in his absence, or 
 he thought it better to disguise her disclosures ; he 
 was courtesy itself, thanked them graciously for looking 
 after his wife, dispensed great quantities of English 
 cigarettes, wept copiously at table at his joyful reunion, 
 and shortly after removed with Linette to the cottage. 
 
 Now, at least, it seemed to Lowther and Pramp that 
 their chastity would remain unassailed by the vicious 
 woman. She appeared only at meals, which they still 
 took at the hotel, and was propriety itself in behaviour, 
 a propriety which was now anxious to pass her off as 
 a blue stocking. She talked literature with more verve 
 than knowledge with Lowther, betrayed a smattering 
 of scientific words, and spoke vaguely of her student 
 days. A pose, of course, which soon revealed itself as 
 but another versatile shaft winged from her variegated 
 quiver. Lowther's steel-blue eyes, square-cut chin, 
 and the reserve which cloaked his shyness, had piqued 
 her interest, and his assumption of chastity her desire. 
 She possessed in a high degree that capacity, common 
 to every woman, of reading between lines that are 
 not there. She mistook Lowther's " flegme britan- 
 nique " and apparent imperviousness to her charms as 
 a mask to hide his glowing passion. Her continental 
 conception of the English male as silent, reserved, dis- 
 trustful of emotion, still more of its expression, given to 
 biting his lips frequently till they bled, and to chewing 
 his moustache as an outlet for passion, fitted Lowther 
 admirably. 
 
 A stream of glowing letters white-hot from the pen 
 followed, in which she strove to encircle the two of 
 them in an atmosphere of clandestine intimacy by 
 
 82
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 attributing to Barna a jealousy, likely to issue in 
 homicide were she discovered, and insisting on the 
 strictest secrecy as essential to the safety of them both. 
 
 Her love was his to trample on was the impression 
 she strove to convey ; she spoilt it by dragging in her 
 body and attendant desires. Lowther trampled and 
 gave no sign. 
 
 This was too much for Pramp. As Linette's veer 
 Lowtherwards had wounded his vanity, so Lowther's 
 neglect wounded his chivalry, or so he called it. 
 
 A man cannot bear to find what is cheap to another 
 dear to him. In these circumstances he may bring 
 down the price of the goods in question for himself, 
 or put it up for his neighbour. Pramp was for the 
 former course. The pendulum swung again, and the 
 Crusader role was resumed. Now she even seemed 
 desirable. 
 
 His attentions increased markedly. They seemed to 
 excite no sentiment in Barna beyond amusement, while 
 she, confronted with a rigid politeness on Lowther's 
 part, was glad enough to play on a second string. 
 
 She could hardly contain her delight that Pramp had 
 issued from his shell of repulsion, and reciprocated her 
 propensity for cheap horse-play, bread throwing, 
 gramophone record breaking, hair pulling and futile 
 rioting generally. Her knowledge of the slang of 
 Montmartre was encyclopaedic. Pramp expressed a 
 desire to be instructed. 
 
 " All right, my sweet, I'll learn you," she said. 
 
 " Well then, what does ' foutez-moi le camp ' 
 mean ? " 
 
 " Oh, ' Clear out of the bl y way.' But there's 
 
 a much choicer expression than that." 
 
 " Tell me." 
 
 83
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " Oh, I couldn't. ' Ne f aut pas choquer les gens con- 
 venables.' When we are all alone, I'll tell you." 
 
 " But we never are. You've always got Barna or 
 some half-boozed commercial traveller round you." 
 
 " Poor little thing. Did he want to be alone with 
 me ? Let him come to my cottage early one morning, 
 and I'll teach him all the most recherche expressions, 
 and anything else he would like to learn." 
 
 " Sounds all right, but what about Barna ? " 
 
 " Oh, that's easy enough. You know, he's a sensitive 
 old bounder. When he gets the sulks, he comes over 
 to the hotel here and sleeps by himself. He hates it, 
 too, at the time, but he comes back all the fresher for 
 his night on the lonesome." 
 
 " Puts a fresh edge on things when they get a bit 
 blunted, I suppose." 
 
 " That's it ; and it's easy enough to offend him. I 
 can do it as easy as winking. He rather likes it ; he 
 takes a satisfaction in his own sulky feelings, and goes 
 off in a tantrum. Look here, I'll arrange a row with 
 him to-morrow night. And you come round early in 
 the morning." 
 
 " Right you are," said Pramp. " I'll turn up." 
 
 He could scarcely sleep the next night for his excite- 
 ment. He had not heard Barna come into the hotel, 
 but did not lose faith for a moment in Linette's genius 
 for creating scenes ; she could send Barna packing out 
 of the house, a simmering old cauldron of offended 
 dignity whenever she chose, and he flattered himself 
 that she would choose for him. 
 
 He rose about six, and walked the ten minutes to the 
 cottage. He was full of eagerness. Linette would 
 open the door to him in her dressing-gown, and this 
 time he would do his best to expunge his former stoical
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 indifference to the charm of that attire. He remem- 
 bered a remark, he thought it was Belloc's, to the effect 
 that the first time a man sees his wife in curl-papers 
 and a red dressing-gown his love is automatically 
 extinguished. Omit the curl-papers ; read simply 
 woman for wife, and for extinguished you may substi- 
 ture inflamed : so he thought and knocked softly. 
 
 He waited. No answer. He knocked again, and at 
 the end of what seemed at least twenty minutes, and 
 was probably five, he heard steps. Bolts were undone, 
 the door opened, and he saw, not a bewitchingly 
 voluptuous form in dressing-gown with a slang diction- 
 ary in her hand, but Monsieur Barna, robed in long 
 white night-gown, the notoriously thin skins of the 
 Frenchman showing meagrely below like sticks prop- 
 ping spindle-like shanks ; on top a lugubrious face, all 
 eyes, as it seemed, in which astonishment struggled 
 with the lees of sleep. For the first and only time 
 within the history of man, or at least of Englishman, 
 Barna was known to forget his manners. 
 
 " What do you want ? " he said. 
 
 Pramp was nonplussed. Visions of duels floated 
 before his imagination. What could he say ? Vaguely 
 he murmured something about taking a morning walk, 
 passing by, and calling to see if they were up. His 
 French must have been quite unintelligible. Barna 
 said that neither he nor his wife were up yet, or any- 
 thing like it. His looks conveyed the surprise which 
 his tongue withheld, and he banged the door in Pramp's 
 face. 
 
 Pramp was lucky enough, on his return, to find that 
 Marie alone of the household was yet downstairs, and 
 took full advantage of the tranquillity pervading a house- 
 hold still fast asleep. Thus even early rising has its uses. 
 
 85
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Pramp never got to the bottom of this rebuff. A 
 word alone with Linette revealed greater power of 
 fencing on her part than one would normally have 
 attributed to her, and to his surprise she denied herself 
 the lengthy explanation with the opportunity it offered 
 of exhibiting herself in a heroic and connubially vir- 
 tuous role, which he had expected. She neither 
 pleaded inability to pique Barna, nor confessed to 
 sudden access of virtue. She resisted even the 
 attractive portrait of herself locked in a cupboard by 
 an irate husband, who stood sentry over her. She 
 simply said she had " forgotten all about it." The 
 palpable mendacity of the subterfuge smacked of 
 genius. There is no point in convicting a woman of 
 untruth, when you not only know she lies, but know 
 that she knows that you know, for if a woman does 
 not mind being detected in an untruth there is no 
 point in detecting her. 
 
 But Pramp was a bourgeois, and a bourgeois can 
 always persuade himself that he does not want what he 
 cannot get. In this he is admirably adapted to life, 
 and survives where men of soul succumb. 
 
 Pramp grew sadly indifferent to the moods of 
 Linette. The glowing river of passion trickled away 
 into the reed beds of complacency. He sat beside her 
 at table and suffered her hand in his without a thrill 
 either of desire or distaste. He almost took pride in his 
 own want of feeling. Had not Lowther and himself 
 now ransacked the vaunted spice chests of Bohemia, 
 probed them to their depths, proved their famed 
 delights to be but dust and ashes, and remained un- 
 scathed ? And all this in three weeks ! 
 
 Unfortunately for their complacency new arrivals 
 gave indications of the existence of other drawers to be 
 
 86
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 opened in pleasure's bureau before they could count 
 themselves the ideal Dorian Grays, equipped at all 
 points in the panoply of experience. 
 
 Three friends of Barna with one lady in tow arrived 
 one day from Paris. Much of the Barna type, with 
 long hair reaching to the shoulders and clad in irre- 
 proachable garb of a cut and stripe too pronounced to 
 dub them merely smart, they were the first French 
 young men of fashion to be presented to the aspirants' 
 after-experience. Gaston and his brother Rene were 
 Paris students, fair, good-looking and twenty. 
 
 Gaston gave evidence of possessing a substratum of 
 intelligence beneath the fop's veneer. Raymond 
 announced himself as the manager of the Paris Coli- 
 seum, surely a lucrative job, though whether such a job 
 existed Pramp never discovered. 
 
 These people proved so fascinating that Pramp, at 
 any rate, abandoned most of his work. He would sit 
 about with them over interminable meals, passing from 
 dejeuner to coffee, from coffee to liqueurs, from liqueurs 
 to an English tea following a hurried bathe, and then 
 after a walk down to the little port, where aperatifs 
 were sipped, as they watched the vedettes arrive with 
 news of the world and the gossip of Paimpol to 
 dinner at the hotel, followed by digestifs and more 
 liqueurs. 
 
 The Frenchmen seemed to exist simply to eat, to be 
 amused at nothing at all (a deflated tennis ball and an 
 unstrung racket kept them rapturously excited for a 
 whole afternoon), and to indulge in shady conversation. 
 The contrast with the English students was complete. 
 The latter spoke continually of theory, doctrine and 
 points of view, while the Frenchmen contented them- 
 selves with women, wine and laughter. The English- 
 
 87
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 men exfoliated theories about God. The Frenchmen 
 attended Mass. The English indulged in serious 
 conversation about the theory of production and the 
 nature of beauty : Gaston, who alone sometimes 
 listened, preferred the practise of reproduction and the 
 beauty of nature, especially female nature. 
 
 As he remarked one day, " You people talk about 
 everything and have experience of nothing." 
 
 " You, on the other hand, profess to know about 
 everything, and talk about nothing," retorted Pramp. 
 " What is the good of all this experience of the world 
 you say you have had, if it leads to nothing but these 
 silly gibes about the boot boy's mistress, or heavy dis- 
 cussions on the comparative merits of the menage here 
 and at the ' Hotel Lucas ' ? " 
 
 " But we don't know everything. It's you who are 
 so crammed full of knowledge, academic knowledge 
 that is. You can't see life yourselves for the number of 
 other people's spectacles that you insist on sticking on 
 to your noses to blink through. We, for instance, 
 know how to enjoy ourselves, while you from all 
 accounts think a woman is a kind of dossier to file rival 
 theories in. You are philosophers, or say you are. 
 But your philosophy only deals with philosophies about 
 life, never with life itself. You know what other 
 people have thought about pleasure, but you don't 
 know how to enjoy yourselves. You may know every- 
 thing about everything, but I'm very much afraid that 
 you don't know anything else. We know some of the 
 other things." 
 
 This sally evoked applause. Pramp was tempted to 
 agree, but could not throw up the sponge without a 
 struggle. 
 
 " But you're simply wasting a good intelligence," he 
 
 88
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 said. " You let fly some silly irrelevant remark when- 
 ever anyone propounds a theory and so make real dis- 
 cussion impossible. One just can't talk decently when 
 you are about." 
 
 " You think I am incapable ? " 
 
 " I don't know that, but you fight shy of it : you 
 regard all serious talk as an opportunity for making 
 witty remarks. Now I am all against heavy men who 
 talk portentously about things that don't matter, such 
 as tramways, dynamos or time-tables. But that's no 
 reason why one shouldn't talk seriously about things 
 which do matter : God, life, women and conduct. You 
 suffer from a sense of humour which has run riot. If 
 all religion is bad, the worship of humour is as offensive 
 as any other form. Yet you Paris people regard the 
 world as a temple of humour, with your friends as 
 communicants and yourselves as high priests. 
 
 "Now the anecdotal is the lowest form of humour, 
 but you find it irresistible. It debauches you like strong 
 wine. For instance, when we are discussing the de- 
 fects and merits, if any, of monogamous unions and the 
 family system, you intrude with a story of a man with 
 a glass eye and a wife in each of five different towns, 
 who was eventually unmasked because the stream of 
 one-eyed children in so many different places and of 
 about the same age evoked suspicion. When we dis- 
 cuss Kant's speculations as to the potency of mind to 
 know matter, you introduce his mistress's speculations 
 as to the impotence of his body. When we debate 
 whether considerations of the happiness of the greatest 
 number are the cause of morality, or whether our 
 ultimate moral conceptions condition our estimate of 
 happiness, you propound as an analogy whether the 
 appearance of intelligence in women is the cause of
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 their taking to spectacles, or whether their taking to 
 spectacles is the cause of their appearing intelligent." 
 
 " And so you think I have never studied philo- 
 sophy ? " 
 
 " Have you ? " 
 
 u I took a scholarship therein at the Sorbonne. I 
 founded my moral theory on a nicely calculated and 
 perfectly consistent amalgam of the tenets of the 
 Intuitionists and the common sense of the Utilitarians, 
 and I discovered that it had no reference whatever to 
 my theory of life, which is the pursuit of pleasure. I 
 live to enjoy myself. I want as much as I can reason- 
 ably expect to get, and I deny myself nothing. Philo- 
 sophy as a highly developed form of mental gymnastics 
 is valuable, I admit ; but only as that. After a time 
 I got beyond the need for mental gymnastics, just 
 as one gets beyond the time for playing football." 
 
 " But the pursuit of pleasure is so dull. It becomes 
 an intolerable servitude. Pleasure should occur inci- 
 dentally when you are actively engaged in the pursuit 
 of something else. The artist in stone decorates con- 
 structions, he does not construct decorations ; and the 
 artist in life lets his aims bring him pleasure instead of 
 aiming at what pleases." 
 
 " What would you have me do, then ? " 
 
 " Devote yourself to some cause. Help the world 
 forward." 
 
 '* Proselytize, in fact ! It is not worth while ; it is 
 so easy to convert people ! You can always propagate 
 a propaganda if you have the proper geese." 
 
 " Oh, do stop making funny remarks and be serious 
 for once." 
 
 " Then stop talking philosophy." 
 
 " Why, philosophy isn't funny ! " 
 
 90
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 " Yes, it is ; not only futile but funny." 
 
 " Why, on earth ? " 
 
 " Because, as you will presently realize, it is only the 
 serious things in life which are funny." 
 
 " Hullo ! Been reading G. K. Chesterton ? " 
 
 " No ! It isn't an idle paradox. Why is it that 
 pomp, dignity, pretentiousness and self-importance in 
 all ages rouse the satirist's mirth ? Because they pride 
 themselves on being serious. Why is it that we all 
 laugh at parsons ? Not because they are funny, but 
 because they are not. Why are judges and kings so 
 funny ? Because they take themselves seriously. Why 
 were the suffragettes an object of ridicule ? Simply 
 because perfectly seriously and sincerely they devoted 
 themselves and all their energies to obtaining a per- 
 fectly serious end. Therefore the suffragettes roused 
 our laughter. And this was not the humour of the old 
 comic paper caricature of the unsexed woman in 
 spectacles, with a tweed skirt and a bun of hair. That 
 caricature was never merited, and is now quite played 
 out. But there is a comic imp that laughs over the 
 shoulders of all fanatics, so that the more serious a 
 suffragette is, the more funny she is, unless circum- 
 stances make her tragic. If a martyr is killed, of course 
 he ceases to be funny. But that is only because death 
 is not really serious. 
 
 " What, again, is more excruciatingly funny to the 
 properly trained observer than the spectacle of women 
 sitting in a row in a bus ? They are funny just because 
 they are so solemn, and sit there quite solemnly and 
 fatuously doing nothing, and looking at nothing. If 
 they laughed, they would cease to be funny. Men in 
 rows are, or would be, equally funny, only they bury 
 their faces in papers. 
 
 9 1
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " Finally, why is the man who fails to see a joke so 
 much funnier than the man who makes it ? Simply 
 because he is the only serious person there. That is 
 the secret of the funniness of Scotchmen. And so 
 when I hear people taking perfectly serious subjects 
 like the constitution and structure of reality quite 
 seriously, I am all the more amused. What could be 
 more amusing than the followers of Bertrand Russell 
 solemnly discussing the existence of purple quadratic 
 equations ? Yet that is one of the most important 
 subjects in the world lying at the root of the problem 
 of the ultimate nature of matter. 
 
 " And so you may say that I am a pragmatist in so 
 far as I believe that thought was meant for action and 
 not for thinking. There are things which should be 
 taken seriously, I grant you : the collapse of a collar 
 stud, the breaking of a boot lace, the folding of a pair 
 of trousers ; but these the world calls trivial." 
 
 " And you," said Pramp, " are what the world calls 
 a dilettante." 
 
 " If a dilettante means not being serious enough to 
 adopt a definite profession, I agree. I am not afraid 
 of a word. I prefer to call myself a gentleman, a 
 gentleman being a person whose mind is not warped 
 by concentration on any special line." 
 
 " You desire no serious pursuits or study ? No core 
 round which to build your time ? " 
 
 " Life itself is a sufficient study and enjoyment. 
 Anything that leads one from the enjoyment and 
 observation of life is not a study but an idle diversion." 
 
 " In fact, you think you are wasting your time 
 whenever you are not wasting it ? >: 
 
 " No, I never think about it at all. That is the only 
 form of wasting time I know." 
 
 92
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 " All very ingenious ! But surely you must take 
 things seriously sometimes ? " 
 
 " I do, but regard it as a lapse. Success in life is to 
 live on the surface, not to dive below it. It is difficult, 
 of course. At times one grows heavy and sinks below ; 
 excess of information in particular makes one heavy, 
 also the possession of a wife ; but as an ideal banish 
 thought ! " 
 
 " And what is left ? " 
 
 " Love and laughter. What more could you want ? 
 Love those women who will let you and laugh about 
 those who won't." 
 
 Even Lowther was impressed. Certainly Gaston 
 seemed an expert in living up to his philosophy. With 
 Barna, Gaston, Raymond and Rene adding their voices 
 in consolation or dispute to the perpetual duet, rarely 
 harmonious of the two ladies, an appalling din was 
 continually maintained in the erstwhile placid veranda 
 of the little hotel. 
 
 Their restlessness was no less remarkable than the 
 trivial objects on which it sought to appease itself. 
 They would dispute with the greatest heat on the 
 alternatives for an afternoon's pleasure, a row, a sail, a 
 lounge on the rocks, or a lounge in the hotel, the sipping 
 of absinthe at the " Hotel du Port " or at the " Hotel 
 Lucas," a game of backgammon or of vingt-et-un. At 
 dinner they solemnly drew lots for the privilege of the 
 ladies' persons for the night. 
 
 A brilliant scheme emanating from the brain of 
 Gaston was the establishment of competitions among 
 the village youthful. A table was set up in the Place, 
 behind which these solemn revellers ranged them- 
 selves, with Pramp and one or two other appendages 
 as judges. On the other side gathered the whole 
 
 93
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 juvenile population of the island with parents in the 
 background, interested and approving when the human 
 was allowed to peep through the parent veneer, sup- 
 pressive and disapprobatory when they remembered 
 their parenthood. The competitions were various 
 rather than original, prizes, first, second and third, 
 being offered for the ugliest face pulled, the boy who 
 could spit furthest, the best song sung or story told. 
 
 The efforts were indescribably poor. The total 
 resultant amusement, however, was enormous. Peals 
 of laughter greeted the face pullings of each applicant ; 
 the village went off its head with delight when the 
 spitting prize was won by a little girl ; and Barna, 
 kind-hearted libertine, found it did violence to his 
 feelings for any comely child to depart disappointed of 
 a prize. Any reasonable effort met with half a franc 
 unless the author was entirely unpleasing. As a 
 method of selecting children the competition was a 
 success, and with yells of joy the most favoured young- 
 sters were carried off to the dinner table. Here the 
 spectacle of them imbibing v in ordinaire stimulated 
 the jaded interest of the sensation seekers. The 
 ladies declared the children adorable, smothered them 
 with chocolates and caresses, and affected indifference 
 to all the attractions of adult maleness, as compared 
 with the charms of their chers gosses. 
 
 But the island was scandalized. The better elements 
 asserted themselves, and a deputation waited on the 
 island mayor at midnight, urging him to expel the 
 plague of Parisians. A night-capped head projected 
 from upper windows (a second was discerned behind, 
 betraying the head of mayoral spouse), protested 
 inability to take action till the morrow. The reform- 
 ers departed baffled, but on the morrow the gen- 
 
 94
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 darmes were sent for. But the mainland town 
 boasted but one, and he was away. In a week he 
 returned and crossed in great importance, and the 
 vedette to the island with innumerable bags and 
 papers, and two satellites. But the Parisians had 
 forestalled him. A new excess in the interval had 
 secured their departure, without the interference of 
 the State. 
 
 Having drained the wine bottle and found the 
 desired effects still sadly to seek, Barna had hit upon 
 ether as the quickest, the pleasantest and the most 
 recherche mode of intoxication. Purchased in liquid 
 form, it was inhaled from a bottle, and he assured the 
 Englishmen that as a nepenthe it put the boasted 
 delights of morphia and opium to shame. Nor were 
 its effects evil. 
 
 One night Gaston and Barna locked themselves 
 alone in Barna's room at the hotel for indulgence in 
 this delight. The Englishmen occupied a kind of loft 
 up a ladder attached to the hotel, but shut off so that 
 the only means of entering the hotel was through the 
 front door, which was barred for the night. About 
 midnight both were awakened by a sound as of horses 
 galloping in the main building. Rushing to the head 
 of the ladder leading to the loft, they beheld a vision of 
 white poised on the window-sill of Barna's room. It 
 shrieked aloud (falsetto), leaped and bumped with a 
 clang on to the tin roof of the veranda. At the same 
 moment the front door opened and Marie, also in a 
 night-gown, rushed out, saw Pramp on the loft stair- 
 way, ran to him, and straightway fainted in his arms. 
 Clouds of smoke came from the window of Barna's 
 room, and soon the whole population of the hotel was 
 gathered jabbering on the veranda. Finally came 
 
 95
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Raymond and Rene, carrying Gaston senseless in their 
 arms. 
 
 For a long time nobody could get anything out of 
 anybody. Barna bleated disjointed bits of informa- 
 tion, mingled with complaints about the pains in his 
 leg, and Rene, who had spent part of the night looking 
 through the keyhole of Barna's room, supplied the gaps. 
 
 It seemed that about midnight, having inhaled ether 
 until they were as drunk as lords and as fuddled as pigs, 
 they began to squabble about Linette, Gaston asserting 
 that she was the same woman Barna had had last 
 summer, with her hair dyed a different colour, and 
 proving his assertions by swearing to an identical birth- 
 mark which appeared upon the knees of both ladies, 
 Barna asking him how the devil he knew what was on 
 the knee of Madame Barna, and in his excitement 
 upsetting the bottle of ether. Too fuddled to remem- 
 ber that he must not strike a light, Gaston lit a match 
 to find the bottle, and the room was in a blaze. Barna 
 sought escape by jumping from the window. Gaston, 
 with a dash of altruism in his composition, stumbled to 
 the. door to unlock it and warn the house. His un- 
 certain hands fumbled with the bolt so long that he 
 was severely burnt before he could open the door for 
 Rene, Raymond and others to rush in arid, after a 
 struggle, to extinguish the flames with rugs and water. 
 
 The story was abruptly brought to a close by 
 bleatings from Barna, who asseverated he had broken 
 his leg. To the general surprise he really appeared to 
 have done so, and Linette, seizing the golden oppor- 
 tunity to manufacture a scene before a large audience, 
 threw her arms round his neck, and with streaming 
 eyes assuring the crowd that he was her own dear 
 husband, that she alone would nurse him and that she
 
 A GLIMPSE OF BOHEMIA 
 
 would never leave his side. Pramp and Lowther, who 
 were getting hardened, went to bed. 
 
 The following day a mournful cavalcade wound its 
 farcical way to the port. First came attendants and 
 bonnes, with stacks of luggage on wheelbarrows. Then 
 two litters : Barna in the first, weeping sentimental 
 tears at the thought of parting from his chers 
 anglais, Linette at his side, weeping more tears 
 because it was the thing to do and circumstances were 
 favourable, and from time to time daubing an eau-de- 
 Cologne handkerchief on his forehead, usually making 
 a bad shot and putting it in his eyes, as the litter 
 bumped and jolted. Behind Gaston, his face pale, for 
 he had been badly burnt, but still retaining sufficient 
 spirit to try and talk like Charles II on his deathbed. 
 Then Raymond and Rene arm-in-arm. These two 
 were suffering from an excess of affection just now, a 
 reaction from a fierce altercation in the morning 
 culminating in mutual scratchings, as to which of 
 them had really had the glory of putting out the fire 
 and saving Gaston's life. 
 
 Finally a heterogeneous mob of villagers of all kinds 
 rejoicing in the discomfiture of le type de Paris, 
 occasionally throwing mud at Linette, with the usual 
 bourgeois dislike for one who had flouted the conven- 
 tions. From the windows spectators gazed down with 
 moral eyebrows duly lifted. Only Pramp and Lowther 
 laughed. So far had their education proceeded. 
 
 " What about the serious things being funny now," 
 said Pramp. 
 
 " Behold the vindication of morality and the 
 Nemesis that waits on wrongdoers," said Lowther. 
 " So do the gods fight always on the side of temper- 
 ance and the marriage tie." 
 
 97 a
 
 Chapter 3 : An Idyll 
 
 P RAMP'S next experiment in the art of love was 
 Dorothy. He met her at the Gordons' dance, 
 to which he had been invited by Mrs. Rolf. Mrs. 
 Rolf had three daughters still unmarried, and though 
 the eldest was wellnigh beyond hope, she was still 
 doing her best for the second and third, and could 
 afford to lose no chance. 
 
 Pramp was under no illusions about Mrs. Rolf. 
 " Oxford society is peculiar matrimonially," he was 
 careful to point out to his friend Jimmy. " The 
 prospective husband, even when he is a star of the first 
 water, is not fixed ; he is transitory, a sort of comet. 
 And his transit is brief : he is only above the horizon 
 for four years, thence passing into the outer darkness of 
 post-Oxford society. All the more important, then, to 
 catch him in transit ! A North Oxford matron must 
 hunt with even more speed than caution." 
 
 " Dances, I suppose, are one of the snares," said 
 Jimmy, who did not dance. 
 
 " Yes, but we get hardened. One gets so much 
 practice that most of us manage to steer a clear course 
 between the smiles of the daughters and the wiles of 
 the mothers, and to go through our four seasons 
 without permanent disablement from either." 
 
 " And the daughters ? " 
 
 " Oh, they persist : each new generation of freshers
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 relights the flame of hope. Some of the more homely 
 have been at it for years, going on for ev.er, like the 
 brook, you know ; others come and go ; they just 
 stay." 
 
 " It is very sad to think of them," said Jimmy, who 
 had a tender heart. 
 
 " It is ! Don't go to dances, and your emotions 
 won't be harrowed. They cluster there in swarms." 
 
 The Gordons' dance was, however, a different sort 
 of affair from the common rout of semi-matrimonial 
 functions. The reputation of the learned professor 
 stamped it from the first. Its appeal and invitation 
 alike were addressed to the illuminated of head as well 
 as of feet. Bald pates were to be seen, who performed 
 not at all. Morris dancing showed its cloven hoof. 
 The waltz was revived, and gawky scholars thumped 
 the floor at arm's length round dismayed partners, 
 consumed by a sweating anxiety to avoid their feet. 
 Were it not for a leavening of skilled young ladies, 
 imported by Lady Gordon from London ballrooms, 
 one had doubted its being a dance at all. 
 
 Pramp looked in vain for the well-known North 
 Oxford performers. Espying one of the Rolf girls, he 
 booked three dances and asked for introductions. Of 
 the numerous names that figured on his programme 
 that night Dorothy's alone emerged into importance. 
 
 When Phyllis introduced him to her school friend 
 he became aware of a demure little figure, all pink save 
 for black eyes and coally-black hair. Timid, with an 
 arch smile, a clinger perhaps on acquaintance, she had 
 clearly strayed into modern society, a heroine from the 
 works of a lady novelist of the last century. 
 
 The first dance, a waltz, revealed her dancing as 
 execrable. They had one more : they sat it out and 
 
 99
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 he persuaded her to cut another. They sat on the 
 stairs in full view of the world. There was nothing for 
 it but conversation. Pramp rang the changes on the 
 topics of Oxford small talk with the speed of an expert. 
 Eights, schools, 'Varsity cricket passed with rapid 
 survey. 
 
 Her eyes betrayed that her interest was elsewhere. 
 
 Pramp thought it was time to be clever, and plied her 
 with epigrams, the only way then known to him of 
 storming the outer fortifications of a lady's heart. 
 
 " I say, let's sit out another dance." 
 
 " I really don't think I ought. I'm engaged to a tall, 
 thin man, with big feet and spectacles." 
 
 " Ought," said Pramp. " What does ' ought ' 
 matter ? If the word ' ought ' means anything at all, 
 it ought to be excluded from the dictionary. Why 
 not do what you like, for a change : stay here and flirt 
 with me ? " 
 
 " How do you know I do like that ? And I certainly 
 mustn't flirt." 
 
 ** But you are flirting now, with your eyes." 
 
 " How dare you say that ! I never use my eyes like 
 some girls do." 
 
 " But you are making eyes at me now." 
 
 " I swear I am not. How can you suggest such a 
 thing ? " 
 
 " Oh, but you are ! You think you aren't, but you 
 are ! Some people do it unconsciously. You see, 
 some people have to make eyes, others have eyes ready- 
 made." 
 
 " You really mustn't say such things with all these 
 people about. I shall get up and go away if you go 
 on." 
 
 " The people make it all the easier. Flirtation, like 
 
 100
 
 any form of acting, requires an audience. Given that, 
 you may riot in innuendo, and escape scathless. 'Tis 
 the very button on the rapier." 
 
 " Oh, stop talking like that ! I suppose it's very 
 clever, because I can't do it, but it doesn't mean any- 
 thing." 
 
 " It means a lot, only it isn't every one can do it. 
 To talk nonsense cleverly is one of the most difficult 
 things in the world. I can do it because I'm a writer." 
 
 " Are you really ? What do you write for ? " 
 
 He enlarged on his contributions to the " 'Varsity," 
 mediocre performances couched in the irresponsibly 
 humorous vein popularized by Punch ; artificial but 
 passable imitations of the famous A.A.M. Already he 
 scented literary fame, and wooed it more particularly 
 for the nimbus of distinction it gives in a lady's eyes. 
 His accounts therefore tended to outrun his per- 
 formances. 
 
 Her interest perceptibly quickened. Her face was 
 warmly flushed. She grew more intimate, admitted 
 liking him and a desire to see him again. " Would she 
 meet him ? " " No, she mustn't do that without her 
 father's permission, which would certainly be withheld 
 until he had seen Pramp." 
 
 He railed at such precautions. He could meet her 
 by chance, a term which admitted the widest interpre- 
 tation. For the present she was obdurate. It would 
 not be right, she said. What did that matter, he 
 wanted to know. " It's awfully stupid being good, 
 and, besides, it does a lot of harm." 
 
 " What should you be, then, if not good ? " 
 
 " Why, wise, of course. Wise enough to do what 
 you want to. If everybody did that instead of fussing 
 about being good the world would be a better place. 
 
 101
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 As it is, it's the business of the wise to repair the mis- 
 chief done by the good." 
 
 She relented so far as to make one concession ; he 
 might come next Sunday to call. Her mother was 
 away. There was only her father. She gave an 
 obscure address in North Oxford, and they parted with 
 a look. 
 
 Pramp scarce gave thought to her during the week. 
 He might, he thought, run out to North Oxford on 
 Sunday afternoon, but it was the devil of a way, and 
 something more amusing might turn up. 
 
 Not so with Dorothy ! She returned brimful with 
 a sense of elation at a new capture. The dourness of a 
 father absorbed in Cicero forbade confidences. She 
 frothed over to a school friend. Ars est celare 
 artem and the chief object of an English girl's educa- 
 tion is to enable her to conceal what she knows. An 
 insight into the private thoughts of Pramp's imagined 
 debutante is granted the privileged novelist from 
 fragments of a letter despatched to Phyllis, the friend 
 of her bosom, next day ; it savours of healthy English 
 womanhood, rampant. 
 
 " My dearest , I am most dreadfully, awfully, 
 
 desperately sorry not to have written before. ... I 
 have met such a duck of a man. You'll never believe ! 
 I've quite a pash for him black curly hair, and I 
 believe he is frightfully clever. I am not frightened 
 though of him, even though he says he is a Socialist. 
 So I have started knitting socks for him, and I am 
 knitting him a pair all red with his college crest inset, 
 so that he can carry his politics on his feet Socialists 
 do wear red, don't they ? Won't he look sweet ? 
 Well, now I've got a surprise packet for you, darling. 
 Do you remember you and me leaning out of the win- 
 
 102
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 dow smoking opposite old Barker's preparatory school, 
 and that fellow Ponto shying us cigarettes across the 
 street ? Did you have a pash for him ? You did, 
 didn't you ? I never did exactly, though Babs thinks 
 him irresistible. Well, anyway, papa's going to let 
 him come to tea next Sunday, so you'd better come ; 
 only you'd better start on him at once, as I may be 
 tempted to have a cut myself. He can make his eyes 
 flash ! And that would show he was really an en- 
 chanter. ... I counted a hundred white horses this 
 term, and then met a missionary. Wasn't it awful ? 
 I don't think I'd like to marry him. Oh, though 
 perhaps you don't know, Mamie told me, if you can 
 count a hundred white horses without seeing a donkey 
 in between, the next man you are introduced to is your 
 future husband. I met such a sweet territorial officer 
 at Bournemouth, and I'm going to try and count 
 another hundred white horses. He looked beautiful in 
 khaki. I think mother had a pash for him, so I must 
 keep off. But, of course, now I've got this new man. 
 I expect he is coming to call, too, next Sunday. Will 
 write again and tell you how it went off after he has 
 been, if you don't come yourself after Ponto. Have 
 you heard that new waltz, * Luscious Love ' ? It's 
 simply dilly. ..." 
 
 Meanwhile Pramp, when he thought at all, was 
 imagining a China shepherdess. 
 
 The following Sunday Pramp called. He took 
 Jimmy with him as a support. Jimmy was the most 
 accommodating fellow in catching the mood or attitude 
 of his friends that he had ever met. He was a regular 
 sponge for the absorption of other men's emotions, and, 
 chameleon-like, was glad or sorry, amorous or puri- 
 tanically chaste, according to the humour of his 
 
 103
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 company. Intellectually, too, he was malleable. 
 Pramp, for instance, remembered converting him to 
 complete atheism in a night, and meeting him on the 
 morrow crossing the quad on his way to morning chapel 
 in a surplice. This chameleon-like faculty was given 
 plenty of exercise by the extraordinarily heterogeneous 
 collection of friends that it brought him. Most men 
 like echoes to their own opinions, and Jimmy fulfilled 
 the function of a perfect Watson for the most varie- 
 gated collection of Holmes's ; he thought every one 
 admirable while in their company, and never had a hard 
 word for any of them when out of it. Consequently, 
 collections of people would be brought together in his 
 rooms who would never dream of speaking to one 
 another anywhere else. 
 
 He would give frequently the vaguest of little teas in 
 his obscure rooms. Always the same mild cake and hot 
 buns ; the same cramped fire and mixture of electric 
 light and daylight, with often some ragged man, the 
 talented son of a Scotch railway porter, to keep the 
 company disjointed. In the middle Jimmy would be 
 handing round cake, spilling the tea on his great red 
 hands, and deferring strenuously to every one's opinions 
 on books and plays. His outlook on life was as nervous 
 as his speech. 
 
 With Jimmy in tow, Pramp penetrated on the 
 following Sunday into the outermost wilds of North 
 Oxford. The house was small and lay in an obscure 
 road. It was not even distinguished by the usual 
 name " Laburnum," " Windy Gap," or what not. 
 It was plain No. 42. 
 
 Dorothy herself opened the door Pramp never 
 discovered whether servants were kept and let him 
 into a dreary little drawing-room, betraying the 
 
 104
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 strangest mixture of suburban floridness and donnish 
 culture in its adornment. The Raphael Madonna 
 faced a large copy of " A Pair of Dark Eyes," given away 
 by the Sketch as a reward for fortitude to those of its 
 readers who had persevered with the paper for a whole 
 year. A bust of Cicero stood on the mantelpiece 
 beneath a comic prehistoric picture of Stone Men play- 
 ing golf, and a stuffed golliwog " Isn't he sweet ? " 
 said Dorothy half hid a view of Athens. 
 
 Dorothy introduced Margaret, her sister ; Phyllis, 
 of course, Pramp knew. The dreaded father had not 
 yet appeared from the study, nor was there any sign of 
 Ponto, and Dorothy confided in a cheerfully subdued 
 voice that her mother was away. " Isn't that 
 scrummy ? " she said. Margaret, it appeared at once, 
 was a punster, and set the note for the conversation in 
 which everybody tried to be funny in turn. Margaret 
 and Phyllis treated the men to a species of humorous 
 badinage which flustered Jimmy to the point of 
 blushing embarrassment, in which feet and hands 
 became commodities to be stowed away somewhere, 
 rather than integral parts of his person. 
 
 Pramp found that the only kind of remark that 
 would do at all was the personal. 
 
 " Is she always as bad as that ? " he would ask 
 Dorothy a propos of a pun by Margaret. " How 
 awful to live with her ! " 
 
 " Nobody asked you to," Margaret would retort. 
 
 After he had come out with the phrase, " emotional 
 tergiversation," which provoked shrieks of laughter, all 
 his remarks were greeted with " I must look that up." 
 Margaret's puns were Herculean. The exposed femi- 
 nine bosom in the heat of an exceptional summer sun 
 was found to grow brown : with the larger aperture of 
 
 105
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 the ball-dress there would be, it was feared, a regret- 
 table contrast of white and brown on the same square 
 foot of skin. Lemon was cited as a good blancher, as 
 good as peroxide, and Margaret came out with " lemon 
 aids " to beauty. The explosion of this pun pro- 
 duced howls of delight. Their expression for all things 
 a hairVbreadth off the beaten track was " like nothing 
 on earth," while Owen Nares and Gerald du Maurier 
 were the theme of emulous eulogisms. The entrance 
 of Dorothy's father, Mr. Redford, put an end to their 
 prattle. 
 
 Mr. Redford had been a brilliant man enough at 
 College. He had taken scholarships and prizes in large 
 numbers, and been accounted a credit to the College. 
 He was, however, equally devoid of influential connex- 
 ions and of that charm of manner (or the self-assurance 
 that apes it) which is the essential substitute for in- 
 fluential connexions if a post as don upon a college 
 staff is desired. He was not a hearty man, and did not 
 possess that capacity of calling dons by their Christian 
 names and walking arm-in-arm with them in the quad, 
 which is the hall mark of the aspirant to a professorship. 
 At the same time, his long acquaintance with Latin 
 verses and Cicero's speeches had rendered him entirely 
 incapable of any other form of employment. He had 
 found the University to be an institution for unfitting 
 him for life, without providing him with the income 
 which his unfitness demanded. 
 
 He became, therefore, an unattached coach, and 
 propelled yearly relays of very stupid men through 
 Smalls and Pass Mods. During the first twenty years 
 of this process, his intellect remaining unaffected, his 
 failure to achieve success commensurate with his 
 promise and attainments made him into a first-class 
 
 1 06
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 cynic. Later, the effects of the unremitting absorption 
 of Cicero, the Gospels and Formal Logic dulled his 
 intelligence, and he turned to religion as a narcotic for 
 his wounded feelings. With increasing age his mind 
 became full of god-webs, and, making a virtue of his 
 necessity, he started to thank God for making him what 
 he was. This resignation was good for his happiness. 
 Religion performs a function similar to beer, in enabling 
 worn-out intellectual hacks to tolerate the otherwise 
 unendurable process of teaching. He had now for- 
 gotton the thwarted ideals and aspirations of the 
 earlier period, and may be described as having found 
 what is commonly called happiness within. As a 
 matter of fact, he was finding in the rewards promised 
 by a future life a compensation for his lack of success 
 in this one, so that when he came to contrast, as he 
 frequently did, the merits of the life before and the 
 life after death, he not unnaturally weighted the scales 
 against the former. 
 
 He was rigid in his morals, intolerant of opposition, 
 and had such a high opinion of his duty as a father that 
 he had become, as far as Dorothy was concerned, a 
 cross between a watchdog and an extinguisher. 
 
 Conversation dried up at his entry. Dorothy ner- 
 vously poured out tea and confined her activities to 
 glancing timidly at Pramp and not eating her bread- 
 and-butter. Pramp did his best to start a conversation 
 with Mr. Redford, who lamented at length the present 
 decay in the composition of Greek Iambics, citing 
 numerous examples from copies of verses that had 
 recently come under his notice, and opining that 
 Pramp, classical scholar though he was, was incapable 
 of compositions of the kind which would have excited 
 comment in his, Mr. Redford's, time. 
 
 107
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " Ah ! you should have seen a set of verses I sent up 
 for the Gaisford Prize on the ' To Be or Not to Be ' 
 speech out of Hamlet. They would have made your 
 hair curl." 
 
 Pramp said that he supposed the art of verse-writing 
 was becoming a lost art at Oxford. He had heard, he 
 said, that at Latin Elegiacs especially even Cambridge 
 was superior. 
 
 Mr. Redford looked stern, and thought that could 
 certainly not be true. However, he descanted on the 
 theme that things were not as they were in his day, for 
 the next quarter of an hour. The weight of his con- 
 versation crushed out steam-roller-like any attempts to 
 turn the subject on the part of the others, and Pramp 
 and Jimmy were glad to get away from the sound 
 of that pursuing condemnatory voice, not without a 
 whispered request from Dorothy that they would 
 come for a picnic on the river with them when her 
 mother came back. 
 
 Pramp found that the Sunday call, with its limited 
 opportunities for conversation, had kindled to an 
 astonishing degree his desire to see more of the suddenly 
 demure Dorothy. Next morning he found himself 
 hanging about the " Corn " on the off chance of seeing 
 her as she came to do her shopping. At twelve he met 
 her. She got off her bicycle and walked beside him, of 
 course expressing surprise, which he, equally of course, 
 reciprocated, at meeting him. They walked half a 
 mile together. Then she became aware of the exist- 
 ence of her reputation, feared to endanger it, and left 
 him. 
 
 " Meet me again like this to-morrow," he pleaded. 
 
 " Oh, I couldn't make an appointment like that 
 without my father knowing ! " 
 
 108
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 " Couldn't you ? Oh yes, do. You see, he'd never 
 find out, and if he did it's perfectly harmless, and we 
 might easily have met by chance, you know." 
 
 " Yes, quite easily, and I expect we shall." 
 
 " Oh, I see what you mean. Be here at the same time 
 to-morrow and we will meet by chance." 
 
 " No, certainly I can't. That would be making an 
 appointment." 
 
 " What a timid little nuisance you are. Tell your 
 father if you like." 
 
 " I couldn't do that. He wouldn't hear of it." 
 
 " Well, don't tell him, and come all the same." 
 
 " Then I should be deceiving him. I couldn't bear 
 to do that. It wouldn't be right." 
 
 " Oh, damn," said Pramp, and apologized on the spot, 
 " call it what you like so long as you come. It is chance 
 really, because we met by chance in the first instance. 
 Anyhow, come." But she had left him. 
 
 Next morning at about the same time he met her 
 again. She expressed even greater surprise at seeing 
 him, and asked him how it was he never worked in the 
 morning. Pramp ascribed his inability to work to the 
 desire to see her, at which she pretended to be cross with 
 him and with herself, and vowed that she would not 
 meet him again. 
 
 " Then you did try to meet me this morning," said 
 Pramp. She blushed at her slip, denied it, and next 
 morning did not appear. 
 
 Four days in all they met in the" Corn" at the busiest 
 time of the morning, and the last time she walked with 
 him into the comparative quiet of Holywell. It was a 
 very hot day, and she wore a big straw hat with red 
 poppies in it, from beneath which her big black eyes 
 glanced up in an entrancing manner. Her brown, 
 
 109
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 freckled face was flushed to a warm brick colour, and 
 the tight pink dress she wore, ill-fitting enough, and, 
 even to a male eye, mended and darned in two or three 
 places, suited her admirably. She seemed all pink and 
 brown and warm, as if she had come out of a hayfield. 
 
 As they walked along Pramp offered to wheel her 
 bicycle, and when she refused, dropped his hand on top 
 of hers to guide it. She let it rest for a time, and when 
 she withdrew her own did not reproach him. Pramp 
 had received that morning a formal little note from her 
 mother containing an invitation to him and to his friend, 
 Mr. James, to go on the river with them the next day, 
 excusing herself at the same time for the short notice 
 given. Dorothy was very excited about it, and most 
 anxious to impress on him the necessity for the best 
 possible behaviour before her mother. Pramp promised, 
 and in turn extracted from her an admission that she 
 didn't know whether she wasn't a little in love with 
 him after all. Male-like he took this as an unqualified 
 declaration that she was, whereupon she hurriedly 
 mounted her bicycle and left him. 
 
 The following day was wet until eleven o'clock. 
 Pramp was a victim to the worst fears and forebodings. 
 So violent was the dread of postponement that he could 
 neither work, nor walk, nor talk. He sat with Jimmy 
 gazing out on a sky that looked as if it had gone bad, so 
 gloomy was the genius of the weather that lowered upon 
 it. At eleven came a gleam of sunshine, and Pramp 
 made a tour of the town to allay his growing excite- 
 ment. Opposite Balliol he met Dorothy. She was 
 indescribably incoherent at coming upon him unexpec- 
 tedly like this, but at last he gathered that she was there 
 because of a letter from her mother, which she was going 
 to leave for him at the College. It contained regrets 
 
 no
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 at the inclemency of the weather, coupled with a hope 
 that Mr. Pramp and Mr. James would nevertheless be 
 able to come to Anstey Road, where she and her daugh- 
 ters would do their best to amuse them for the after- 
 noon. Dorothy confided to him that she had got her 
 mother to write this after numerous pleadings, and said 
 that although it would not be so much fun as the river, 
 they would still be able to have all the afternoon 
 together. Pramp was delighted, and promised to come 
 early. 
 
 By half-past two the sun was shining brightly enough. 
 The door was opened by Dorothy herself. Margaret 
 and a fat, cold-eyed woman, void of distinction of any 
 kind, who turned out to be Mrs. Redford, welcomed 
 them Margaret effusively and Mrs. Redford conven- 
 tionally in the passage. In five minutes they had 
 started for the river prodigiously laden with cakes, buns, 
 bread-and-butter, sandwiches, and bottles of a pale 
 looking liquid which Mrs. Redford alleged to be home- 
 made lemonade, and which, to Pramp's dismay, was, he 
 learnt, to do duty for tea, Mrs. Redford descanting the 
 while on the inconveniences of a spirit-stove and the 
 difficulty of boiling water in the open air. 
 
 Pramp sat next to Dorothy in the punt, and to avoid 
 losing his place arranged for Jimmy to punt practically 
 all the time, on the ground that Jimmy was particularly 
 attached to punting and never got tired of it. It was a 
 dull outing at first ; the conversation was peculiarly 
 vapid, and the proximity of Mrs. Redford, who surveyed 
 them unremittingly with a cold, unvarying expression, 
 made any intimacies between Dorothy and Pramp 
 impossible unless carried on in whispers, and these 
 would clearly lead Mrs. Redford to suspect the worst 
 at the outset. 
 
 in
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Jimmy was an execrable punter, and in bringing the 
 punt in to the bank to allow of disembarkation for tea, 
 took them through a thorn bush which removed Mrs. 
 Redford's hat, scratched her face, spoilt her temper, and 
 generally did not make matters any better. 
 
 The preparations for tea went forward somewhat 
 ominously. Pramp and Dorothy unpacked the things, 
 Margaret and Jimmy laid them out, and Mrs. Redford 
 maintained a brooding silence. 
 
 Pramp caught the prevailing depression, which for 
 him was intensified by the substitution of the home- 
 made lemonade a pallid concoction reminiscent rather 
 of the barley water familiar to those recovering from 
 influenza than of any known festive drink for tea. 
 Tea, he held, was the only thing which makes riverside 
 picnics in any way endurable. 
 
 His irritation at the lack of tea embraced even 
 Dorothy in its compass, and implicated her in the guilt 
 of the barbarous provisioning for which her mother was 
 responsible. 
 
 He did manage, however, to bring himself to squeeze 
 and hold her hand under cover of packing up the 
 tea-things, and in a moment of inspiration, to which 
 Jimmy's inept exhibition of punting gave some show of 
 reasonableness, arranged that Dorothy and himself 
 should sit side by side in the stern of the punt, that is, 
 behind Mrs. Redford's back, and paddle home. Dorothy 
 supported the suggestion, saying that she was cold and 
 wanted the exercise. 
 
 They could now talk without being heard, and for 
 the first time were able to exchange intimacies, which 
 were rendered all the more confidential by the necessity 
 of speaking in the lowest tones. 
 
 Dorothy, who really believed herself to be in love, 
 
 112
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 followed the normal course of procedure suggested to 
 her by her novelette reading, and sentimentalized at 
 large over Pramp's brown eyes and curly hair. She was 
 still a little shocked by what seemed to her his flippant 
 attitude in what was, according to her feelings, of 
 appropriateness, a most solemn moment. He alluded 
 to the most tremendously important things in an out- 
 rageously offhand manner. " You know, dear," he 
 said, " when we are married I shan't allow you to teach 
 our children any religion." 
 
 Here were three of the most sacred things in a 
 middle class young woman's life marriage, children 
 and religion taken for granted, and polished off in a 
 sentence by Pramp, as though he were referring to the 
 kind of marmalade he preferred for breakfast. 
 
 " What an awful thing to say. How do you know we 
 are going to be married ? " 
 
 " Oh, I suppose we shall be, and have children too. 
 It's done, you know," said Pramp, and left it at that. 
 Dorothy was thoughtfully silent for some time after this, 
 and Pramp, who preferred holding her hand under cover 
 of the rug to enduring her silence, suggested that Mar- 
 garet and Jimmy should change places with them. He 
 could now caress Dorothy's hand under the rug, which 
 the cold justified, under the very eyes of Mrs. Redford, 
 who took her revenge by walking all the way home with 
 them, while Jimmy and Margaret went on ahead. She 
 managed on the return walk quietly to disparage all the 
 people and pursuits Pramp said he was keen on, and 
 took full licence of the opportunities for being covertly 
 disagreeable that the most punctilious politeness allows. 
 
 At the door of the house, which Pramp and Jimmy 
 were not invited to enter, Pramp asked Mrs. Redford 
 and her younger daughter to take tea with him next 
 
 113 H
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 week, an invitation which lay within the confines of the 
 strictest conventional behaviour. She replied that she 
 would ask Mr. Redford, and let him know. 
 
 The chill induced by this dubious reply entirely failed 
 to damp the glow of triumph experienced by Pramp at 
 the thought that Dorothy really seemed to be attracted 
 to him. His feeling for her he interpreted as meaning 
 nothing more than is usually signified by a violent flirta- 
 tion. He did not want to marry Dorothy, or, to put 
 it more correctly, he had never thought of marrying her 
 at all except in the sense in which every young man 
 plays with the conception of every young woman he 
 meets as a possible wife ; but he did want enormously 
 to be able to make love to her if he wanted to, and felt 
 just now that he could not have too much of her com- 
 pany. He had never experienced in the company of 
 any other young woman quite the ecstatic thrill that her 
 proximity produced, and he flattered himself neverthe- 
 less that his affection was remarkable for its purity. He 
 was indeed surprised at the extent to which it lacked any 
 physical element. Pramp was excessively pleased to 
 find in himself the capacity for such a disinterested 
 affection : his nature must be more spiritual than he 
 had supposed. " Mine is a pure love," he told Jimmy, 
 " the sort that puts women on pedestals, and ought to 
 put men into a madhouse for nourishing such an idiotic 
 sentiment, if we did not all combine to license the 
 inbecilities of lovers on the glass houses principle." 
 
 " But don't you think of her sexually at all ? Don't 
 you find yourself wondering, for instance, whether 
 she would prove an exuberant mate on the physical 
 plane ? " 
 
 " No more than I wonder whether she can cook, or 
 darn stockings, which is to say, not at all. I am really 
 
 114
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 in love, Jimmy, this time. Can't you understand 
 that ? " 
 
 But the warmth of his feelings was destined to re- 
 ceive a check for all their purity. On Monday Pramp 
 received a letter addressed in an unknown hand, the 
 handwriting of which exhibited all the skimpy neatness 
 and minuteness of caligraphy that characterize the don. 
 It read as follows 
 
 DEAR MR. PRAMP, 
 
 It is only to-day that I have learnt of the honour 
 you propose to do my family. I cannot help feeling 
 that this is a little premature, and you are, of course, 
 much too young, both of you, to think of an engage- 
 ment. If you are in earnest, however, perhaps you will 
 come and talk the whole matter over with me next 
 Sunday afternoon. I must ask you in the meantime not 
 to see or communicate with my daughter in any way. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 F. REDFORD. 
 
 To say that Pramp was astonished would be to do but 
 scant justice to his feelings. He had dallied, and it 
 seemed he had been taken seriously. He put the ques- 
 tion to himself and answered it honestly : had he or had 
 he not delivered himself of anything approaching in the 
 vaguest way to a proposal ? No, he had not. Perhaps 
 that passing remark about not teaching their children 
 religion ? But no, the girl could not have been such a 
 fool as to interpret that as an offer of marriage. How- 
 ever, there was no denying it would be great fun being 
 engaged to Dorothy. He would go out into the town 
 and try and meet her. Perhaps she could throw some 
 light on -the matter. 
 
 "5
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 As he left his rooms he met Jimmy. What did he 
 think of the letter ? Jimmy was rather alarmed. " He 
 thinks you are an eligible 'parti ; probably he's been 
 making inquiries about your income. What he's really 
 asking you is the old question : ' Are your intentions 
 honourable ? ' 
 
 " What are your intentions towards my daughter ? 
 Do you intend to behave honourably or to act like a 
 gentleman ? Well, I haven't thought much about it, 
 but on the whole I don't think I'll act like a gentleman. 
 I like her too much." 
 
 Tremendously excited, he hung about the " Corn " 
 all the morning. About half-past twelve, to his delight, 
 he came upon Dorothy. She appeared to want to avoid 
 him, but he made her get off her bicycle and walked 
 beside her. 
 
 " We oughtn't to talk, you know," she said, " after 
 what father said. We're not to see each other till next 
 Sunday." 
 
 " Oh, I wanted to ask you about that. I had a most 
 extraordinary letter from your father this morning, and 
 wondered if you knew anything about it. He seems to 
 think we are engaged, and writes to say that of course 
 that is impossible as we are so young. I am to go and 
 talk it all over with him next Sunday, however." 
 Dorothy stammered out something he could not catch. 
 " Well, this is all very amusing and fresh, isn't it ? " he 
 went on. " I mean, of course, it would be awful fun to 
 be engaged, wouldn't it ? " he added, seeing a look of 
 something like dismay flit across her face, " but it's the 
 first I had heard of it, that's all ! " 
 
 " Well, but . . ." said Dorothy, blushing. 
 
 " What's the matter, dear ? We aren't engaged as a 
 matter of fact, are we ? But I will get engaged to you 
 
 116
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 at once if you like. Come, let's be engaged ; it would 
 be awful fun." 
 
 " Oh, Arthur ! I thought I thought you asked me 
 something in the boat which meant . . ." She could 
 not finish the sentence. 
 
 " Marriage ? Did I, dear ? I don't remember it 
 exactly. When was it ? However, I will. Will you 
 marry me ? " 
 
 " You know you said about our being married, that 
 you wouldn't let me teach our children religion," said 
 Dorothy, the tears beginning to flow. 
 
 " And do you mean to say you told all that to your 
 father ? " 
 
 Dorothy did not answer. 
 
 u Come, did you ? " 
 
 " I told mother, and asked her what I ought to 
 do." 
 
 " Well, you are a little goose. That, of course, is the 
 origin of the letter. Anyhow, we'll get engaged now 
 even if we were not before, and I will tell your father all 
 about it on Sunday." 
 
 " No, no ; we're not engaged," said Dorothy, the 
 tears coming in earnest now. " You didn't mean it ! I 
 thought you did at the time, and now I see you didn't. 
 You were only making fun of me." 
 
 " I did mean it. Dorothy, you will marry me, won't 
 you ? " Pramp was suddenly tremendously afraid of 
 losing her. 
 
 " Oh, I don't know. I don't know. You've been 
 playing with me. Let me go away." 
 
 She tried to get on her bicycle. Pramp was for 
 detaining her, but she pushed him away, and he, afraid 
 of a scene in the street, let her go. 
 
 And that was the last time he ever spoke to her. 
 
 117
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 The next morning he received a further letter from 
 Mr. Redford. 
 
 DEAR MR. PRAMP, 
 
 It is plain from what passed between you and my 
 daughter this morning at the meeting which, contrary 
 to my wishes, you forced upon her, that you are not 
 serious. In these circumstances it will, of course, be 
 unnecessary for you to see me on Sunday. Surprising as 
 your conduct has been, I have hitherto treated you 
 as a gentleman in this matter, and I must ask you, 
 if you are one, to hold no further communication 
 with my daughter or with any other member of my 
 family. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 F. REDFORD. 
 
 This specimen of epistolary curtness dismayed Pramp. 
 For the first time he realized how much he wanted 
 Dorothy. The tendency of humans only to value their 
 possessions when faced with the prospect of their loss 
 has already been descanted on by writers to the point 
 of tediousness ; there is no need therefore for me to 
 elaborate it. Pramp was filled with a sudden longing, 
 almost Oriental in its possessiveness, to retain Dorothy 
 at all costs. 
 
 He wrote immediately to Mr. Redford, stating that 
 he, Mr. Redford, must be under a misapprehension as to 
 what had passed on Monday morning : that he, Pramp, 
 was perfectly in earnest in his sentiments towards 
 Dorothy : that he formally asked for permission to 
 become engaged to her, and that as the posture of affairs 
 had in no way been altered since Mr. Redford had 
 written his first letter, he, Pramp, proposed to call on 
 
 lift
 
 AN IDYLL 
 
 him next Sunday and talk the whole matter over as 
 originally arranged. 
 
 This letter brought the following reply 
 
 DEAR SIR, 
 
 I am astonished beyond measure that after your 
 behaviour on Monday morning you should write to me 
 again. I have hitherto treated you as a gentleman. 
 As you decline to behave as such I must again forbid 
 you to communicate in any way either with myself or 
 my family. Any further letters you may send will be 
 returned unopened, and my wife and daughter will not 
 speak to you should they meet you in the town. 
 
 I may add that I am writing this with the full agree- 
 ment of my daughter, who, you may like to know, now 
 regards you with the greatest contempt and dislike. 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 F. REDFORD. 
 
 For some days Pramp hung about on the offchance of 
 seeing Dorothy in one of the old places in the morning. 
 Probably she purposely kept away. For a week he 
 deliberated with a sense of growing loss on the best thing 
 to do. The only result of these deliberations was the 
 brilliant idea of sending to Mr. Redford the volume of 
 Shaw's plays containing " Getting Married," with the 
 preface on family life heavily marked and appropriately 
 annotated. This he enclosed with a polite little note, 
 but beyond the net loss of 4_r. 6d. thereby incurred, 
 nothing further resulted from the sally. 
 
 Twice afterwards did he see Dorothy. Once he met 
 her during the following spring on the towpath in Torpid 
 time. Both were with friends, and he raised his hat. 
 She blushed violently, but made no further sign of 
 recognition. 
 
 119
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 One afternoon the following summer they passed 
 quite close in punts on the Cher. This time she bowed 
 involuntarily, and Pramp made no sign. 
 
 But then he was with Celia. 
 
 120
 
 Chapter 4. : Tinkering with Socialism 
 
 i 
 
 IT was in Oxford that Pramp first met the Midwivians 
 or Mivians, but it was not until he came to London 
 that he had leisure to observe their habits in close 
 proximity. This famous society derived its name from 
 the part it was destined to play in the coming of the new 
 world. As a society of Socialists it looked and worked 
 continually for this coming, but held that, owing to the 
 hardness of men's hearts and the thickness of their heads, 
 the Socialistic Utopia could not be brought to birth 
 except through violent revolution, unless unless the 
 Midwivians were at hand to ease the violence- of the 
 birth pangs by gently softening the selfishness of the 
 ( ' haves " and curbing the covetousness of the " have 
 nots." By the intervention of the Midwivians revolu- 
 tion might be avoided, and the bad old world of to-day 
 might be insensibly transformed into the millennium of 
 to-morrow with no bones broken and no bloodshed. 
 Hence their somewhat peculiar name arose from the role 
 they destined for themselves as midwives at the birth 
 of the new world ; but the full title " Midwivians," 
 being somewhat clumsy and liable to abuse by unscru- 
 pulous opponents, was shortened into Mivians, by 
 which name the members of the society were usually 
 known. 
 
 121
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 The society had first sprung into great renown owing 
 to the genius of a few of its early members. There had 
 been, for instance, the constructive political thinking of 
 Mr. Graham, the urbane wit of Mr. Hubert, the statis- 
 tical greatness and encyclopaedic knowledge of Mr. 
 Sidney, and above all the literary genius of Mr. Herbert 
 George and Mr. George Bernard. Each and all of 
 these had acquired a great reputation. But the Mivian 
 Society was a small society, and as the fame of its mem- 
 bers became increasingly inflated, its bounds became too 
 constricted to contain them. The clash of overblown 
 reputations that followed resulted in periodical resigna- 
 tions or ejections from the society ; but the mutual 
 recriminations that ensued only lent additional spice to 
 the reputations they distinguished, while the society 
 continued on its way strengthened rather than weak- 
 ened by this rejection of substances it was unable to 
 assimilate. 
 
 At the time when Pramp first came to London from 
 Oxford, Mr. Arnold and Mr. Herbert George had already 
 left the fold, and, freed from statistical trammels, had 
 finally taken the literary pen between their teeth and 
 enhanced the already considerable splendour of their 
 names. Thus the society had at present the rather 
 unfortunate reputation of being a forcing-house for 
 embryo geniuses, who immediately left it on attaining 
 maturity. 
 
 As for the rank and file at this period, they were 
 persons heavy with information, who dabbled 
 discursively in state-making, knew all about drainage 
 and birth control, and had a worthy contempt for 
 sentiment and the social worker. On the whole, 
 they were a dull crowd enough, fluttering mothlike 
 round the splendour of a few great names, and re- 
 
 122
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 fleeting therefrom a spurious reputation for cleverness 
 in suburban debating societies. The women had 
 views on the sex question, and were invariably 
 emancipated. Invariably also they had unrelieved 
 fen country for breasts, spectacles and a dome for a 
 forehead. It was a moot question whether they became 
 Mivians because their busts were flat, or whether their 
 busts were flat as a result of their becoming Mivians. 
 Certainly they might have turned to the arid comfort 
 of the society's socials and outings in despair of the love- 
 making denied to them by their lack of charm ; on the 
 other hand, attendance at meetings and the digestion 
 of facts and nuts for beef, might well subdue the round- 
 est bosom, transferring its substance to the brain. The 
 men were mainly officials, local or national, and pallid 
 at that. Officialdom had subdued their souls : their 
 minds were leathery without resilience. The revolu- 
 tionary fire had departed from them, smothered under 
 an avalanche of facts. They possessed neither that 
 enthusiasm for the revolution without tears, nor that 
 skill in social obstetrics which had animated the early 
 members and given the society its name. The Mivian 
 Society was, in fact, passing through a period of decad- 
 ence. The performance of its great function had been 
 too long deferred. It had outlived its inspiration ; its 
 great men were senile and its little men were worship- 
 pers at dying flames and dead altars. Most of them 
 knew it, and the knowledge depressed them. 
 
 Pramp had first to make acquaintance with the 
 habits of these people at the Mivian Caravanserai. 
 Tired out and stale after his final schools at Oxford, he 
 had taken the first opportunity of getting away from 
 London to recuperate, and had come to the caravan- 
 serai partly because he had nothing better to do, partly 
 
 123
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 to find out what London Mivians were like on their 
 holidays. 
 
 The Caravanserai was the outcome of a brilliant 
 inspiration on the part of that eminent anti-vivisec- 
 tionist, anti-carnivorous anti-tea-coffee-alcohol and 
 smoke specialist, Trout. 
 
 " London," he said upon the Mivian Council of 
 Authority, " is a big place : England is bigger. Conse- 
 quently most Mivians never see each other at all. Even 
 in London we meet for short hurried intervals, rush 
 away again to our wives or our money-making, and pay 
 the penalty of living too fast by being invariably jaded 
 and bad-tempered." Here he glanced at Ponders, 
 another eminent vegetarian practitioner, who, however, 
 admitted tea and coffee. " We are really nothing like 
 such unpleasant people as we think we are," continued 
 Dr. Trout. " But we are always meeting under unfav- 
 ourable conditions round an unappetizing table, in a 
 stuffy little room, for the discussion of uninteresting 
 themes like sewers and municipal trading. The vast 
 majority of the society do not, however, know each 
 other sufficiently well to discuss sewers and municipal 
 trading." Sensation ! Also he said that men ought 
 not to go away with their wives for their holidays, and 
 that they had all got beyond pierrots and the seaside, 
 or he hoped they had, while country inns were not what 
 they were, or, if they were, Messrs. Chesterton and 
 Belloc had spoilt them. This obscure reference to the 
 evils of beer and beer poetry was allowed to pass with- 
 out comment in the alluring alternative which Dr. 
 Trout proceeded to open. 
 
 The depressing vision presented by eight hundred 
 members of an intellectual society being continually 
 deprived of the inestimable benefits of one another's 
 
 124
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 company, had never before been brought home to the 
 Council of Authority. Now that it was, it seemed an 
 unspeakable waste. The society consisted of uncorre- 
 lated units. Bring them together, and who knew what 
 sparks of inspiration might not be struck from the con- 
 tact of their souls. The intercommunication of ideas 
 would alone be of inestimable benefit ; new truths 
 might even emerge amid beautiful surroundings, of 
 course. Also the members of the Council of Authority 
 would be able to lecture. The prospect of an intelli- 
 gent audience compelled to attend lectures by the 
 Council of Authority for one hour daily, settled the 
 question. 
 
 A fine old mansion was hired in the lake district, and 
 an elderly woman, a Mivian, of impregnable propriety 
 and an unparalleled capacity for managing, named Miss 
 Parkin, was installed as manager. Circulars were sent 
 out. The fact that Mr. George Bernard or Mr. Sidney 
 might be seen in the flesh, questioned, sat next to at 
 meals, asked to pass the mustard, and photographed, 
 worked upon the love of the great inherent in the 
 Mivian breast and attracted the members in shoals. 
 
 It was a glorious place, Pramp thought, as he sat on 
 the terrace the first morning after his arrival, not 
 listening to a lecture on the " Internal Organization 
 of the Stock Exchange " by the Finance Expert of the 
 Council of Authority. In the foreground was a lake, 
 glorious in the sun, on either side were mountains, 
 at the back was a splendid pine-clad hill rising to a 
 height of about a thousand feet, and all around were 
 the Mivians clad in djibbahs and knickerbockers, 
 with the Financial Expert manipulating figures in the 
 middle. 
 
 The lecturer talked for an hour, the men listening 
 
 125
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 with an air of rapt worldly knowledge on their 
 countenances, the women sewing with an expression 
 of quiet feminine understanding of the great simple 
 truths lying behind these figures and statistics, which 
 appeared so intricate on the surface. They were jolly 
 women, Pramp found, and could talk about the books 
 they had read quite intelligently. 
 
 It was at this lecture that he first became aware of 
 Daisy. He had the works of Mr. Herbert George very 
 much in his mind just then and so was forming the 
 habit of becoming aware of members of the opposite sex. 
 
 She sat just behind him, a fragile girl with brown 
 curly hair and pince-nez, and as she listened to the 
 lecturer, taking numerous notes, she produced the 
 effect of being very learned and a little critical. It 
 was only afterwards that Pramp found that she had 
 been engaged in writing a letter. 
 
 After the lecture most of the assembly went off for 
 a fifteen-mile walk, taking their luncheons. Pramp 
 stayed behind to play tennis, mainly because he had 
 heard Daisy signify her intention of remaining too. 
 Goppers was arranging the tennis. Coppers was a 
 photographer and an ardent Theosophist ; he believed 
 in spiritualizing the flesh, and lived on nuts and raw 
 eggs. He had watery blue eyes and spectacles, with 
 the head of an athlete on the body of a thinker. 
 
 Philosophers have noticed that the majority of 
 those who are possessed of some marked claim on the 
 attention or admiration of the world, careless of such 
 celebrity as their special talent wins for them, burn 
 with anxiety to obtain repute for some entirely 
 irrelevant attainment in which they approach the 
 commonplace. Thus politicians devote their energies 
 and conversation to golf, lawyers are proud of their 
 
 126
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 fishing, famous logicians seek reputation for their 
 knowledge of the vegetables of Greece, and musical 
 comedy actresses for the domesticity of their homes. 
 
 Similarly Goppers, who possessed first-class creden- 
 tials as an original thinker or crank according as one 
 did or did not agree with him, was above all things 
 eager to excel in tennis. Now his tennis was the 
 most commonplace thing about him, and that is a 
 euphemism. 
 
 Pramp, who was no great player, towered superbly 
 above the others. It gave him great pleasure to 
 ally himself with Daisy, who appeared on the courts 
 after lunch and was quite the worst player he had 
 ever seen, to cover her with magnanimity whenever 
 she missed a shot and especially to obtain her approval 
 of the grossest poaching on the plea of the necessity 
 for winning, which he did. At the end she favoured 
 him with " You play a splendid game." He glowed 
 in the warmth of her palpable approval, but did his 
 best to veil his conceit by belittling the others. 
 
 " Oh, I'm very much out of practice now," said he, 
 indicating unimagined heights of excellence, " and the 
 court here is so very different from the Oxford courts." 
 
 " Oh, were you at Oxford ? " And so it all came 
 out, including an account of Pramp's University 
 career, of his brilliance, of his academic distinctions, 
 of his taking a Fellowship examination in his stride, 
 his doubt as to whether he should accept the Fellow- 
 ship if offered, his literary ambitions as an alternative, 
 and so forth. It all lasted very pleasantly till tea, 
 for Pramp at that time possessed a marked facility for 
 transforming any conversational opening into an 
 Oxford gambit. Daisy was visibly impressed. 
 
 After tea, Pramp suggested a blackberrying expedi- 
 
 127
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 tion. A half-promise to go to the nearest town, four 
 miles away, with Coppers to buy boots claimed the lady. 
 Pramp ridiculed the proposition. " Why are we here 
 at all ? " he said. " Because we want to get away from 
 towns. What's the point of running back to them ? 
 You'll only see newspaper posters advertising the 
 fact that we or the Germans have succeeded in killing 
 so many more men ! " 
 
 " Oh, I won't look at them, but I must get some 
 more cotton, and I'm sure Mr. Goppers could never 
 choose boots for himself." 
 
 " His feet will survive another week ! You've got 
 fifty weeks of the year to haggle with tradesmen in. 
 Why spoil the other two ? " 
 
 Daisy was acquiescent, but what of Goppers ? 
 The great man was nowhere to be seen. The rarified 
 intuition of his psychical nature had already detected 
 the presence of a new influence, and a hostile one. He 
 had withdrawn the sensitive chords of his being from 
 violation by an uncongenial presence : so he phrased 
 it to Daisy later. In other words he was sulking in his 
 bedroom. Daisy and Pramp went after blackberries. 
 
 ;;;'- 2 ' ^ : : '- ; 
 
 The walking party returned breathing vigour, and 
 betraying an edge to appetite which was stayed by 
 slow degrees with nuts, lentils, haricot beans and 
 various savouries. Thus etherealized even by their 
 appetites they were suitably receptive for a post- 
 prandial paper by Goppers on " Reincarnation and 
 the need for frugality." The paper was confused but 
 stimulating. The room was lined with the faces of 
 ardent young Mivians, teachers for the most part, 
 rapt or bovine, lapping up the atmosphere of unwonted 
 
 128
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 notoriety which the presence of Mr. George Bernard, 
 and the expectation of taking part with him in the dis- 
 cussion, perhaps even of contradicting him, imparted. 
 
 Coppers began by insisting on Reincarnation as the 
 only possible explanation of evil. It was only on the 
 supposition that the individual had a number of lives 
 that all the manifest injustices, the unrequited merit, 
 the unpunished and successful iniquities of this 
 existence could be paid and repaid in full. The 
 misfortunes which befell us in this life could in short 
 only be explained on the ground that we were in 
 reality expiating sins committed in former lives, 
 while in our successes and happiness we were reaping 
 the rewards of good actions. To that extent at least we 
 had not free will. Each life could only be understood 
 with reference to the previous ones, and our actions 
 were determined by the legacies they bequeathed. 
 We had indeed forgotten our last lives, and therefore 
 the events of this one seemed perplexing and unjust. 
 To God, however, the continuity was apparent, and 
 so was the steady advance in goodness perceptible, as 
 our lives succeeded one another. For in spite of retro- 
 gressions there was a definite trend of progress. Thus 
 the amoeba became an ape, rationalized himself into a 
 man, and eventually etherealized himself into a dis- 
 embodied spirit. 
 
 We had each of us three planes, the physical, the 
 mental and the astral. The physical was intermittent, 
 depending upon our habitation of bodies. The astral 
 and the mental were continuous. The object of our 
 numerous lives was to pass beyond the physical and the 
 astral planes and to live ultimately on the mental. We 
 were all on different rungs of the ladder of progression. 
 It was therefore our business to mortify the flesh in 
 
 129 i
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 order that the emancipation from bodily dross and 
 disembodiment into the mental might be the more 
 expeditiously effected. More particularly meat should 
 be eschewed, as tending to stimulate and vivify the 
 physical side. Carnal pleasures, including even smok- 
 ing, must be avoided. We must live in a world of 
 thought and vegetables, that our release from the 
 trammelling shackles of bodily existence, our fleshly 
 prison, might be rapidly secured. 
 
 Thus science and religion were finally reconciled 
 and yoked to the chariot of triumphant Theosophy. 
 Coppers supplied the place of knowledge by converting 
 his conjectures into dogmas. Hypothesis posed as 
 indisputable fact, and anaemic seers carefully per- 
 meated with Theosophist theory were cited as being 
 in possession of mystic evidence of the truth of the 
 doctrines they proclaimed and were paid for pro- 
 claiming. 
 
 The audience was swayed. Many had already 
 dabbled in occult science and believed they believed 
 in Theosophy. Theosophy was at once the prop and 
 the mirror of their opinions, thus enclosing them in a 
 vicious circle of which they were unaware. Incredible 
 feats of memory, intimations of former existences were 
 cited, . . . dreams recalled. Pramp was heard to 
 smother something about late suppers and pork 
 pies ... At the first lull he arose bitterly sceptical. 
 
 " He spoke," he said, " as an accredited philosopher, 
 and as such expressed his profound conviction that 
 Theosophy was pure nonsense. 
 
 "As symbolic evidence of this fact, it was to be 
 observed that like most religions it was almost entirely 
 in the hands of women. These were mainly wealthy 
 spinsters seeking in the quasi-worship of the anaemic 
 
 130
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 Indian Youths and Great White Masters, encouraged 
 by this religion, a substitute for that sexual satisfaction 
 from which they were barred by their appearance, the 
 overplus of women, and the practise of monogamy." 
 
 Here Pramp digressed somewhat, citing as further 
 evidence of the sexual basis of religious appeal, the 
 preponderance of women in English churches where 
 the spectacular and personal deity was a man, and the 
 greater numbers and more marked enthusiasm of 
 males on the Continent, where the Roman Catholic 
 religion used as its figurehead for worship and pictorial 
 appeal the person of a woman. 
 
 Recalled to his subject by the heated interjections of 
 those who disputed his facts, or ridiculed his con- 
 clusions, and the murmurs of those who were shocked 
 at his levity, he brought his attack to bear upon 
 Theosophy proper. He became fragmentary, making 
 disconnected points. 
 
 Reincarnation the core of the system ! What 
 evidence ? Not a particle beyond the reported dreams 
 of Indian fakirs whose salaries depended upon the 
 regular and retrospective occurrence of these nocturnal 
 phenomena, and the dyspeptic reminiscences of 
 fashionable mediums anxious to acquire the reputation 
 of having had an interesting past in another life. 
 The doctrine could not be disproved certainly. But 
 the fact that a doctrine could not be disproved was in 
 no conceivable sense an evidence of its truth. It 
 could not be disproved that the planet Venus was 
 inhabited by five-eared jabberwoks who lived on purple 
 quadratic equations. But that did not mean that 
 there was any reason to suppose that Venus was 
 inhabited by five-eared jabberwoks with this peculiar 
 form of diet.
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 But perhaps Reincarnation provided a possible 
 explanation of the puzzles of existence. What single 
 thing did it explain ? 
 
 Mr. Coppers had said that the existence of evil, 
 injustice and unhappiness was only explicable on the 
 assumption that we were paying for mistakes com- 
 mitted in previous lives, and that the injustices of 
 this world would in time be rectified in future 
 ones. 
 
 " Leaving out of account the question of evolution 
 and one's natural resentment at suffering now for 
 depredations one committed as an amoeba," continued 
 Pramp, " how does he explain the existence of evil 
 and suffering in our first life ? He must admit indeed 
 that they did exist then, for otherwise there would be 
 no penalties to pay or rewards to receive in our second 
 life, which penalties and rewards in turn form the 
 basis of the events of our future lives in an unbroken 
 chain right up to the present. By projecting the 
 problems and injustices of this life into a life anterior 
 to our knowledge you do not solve them. 
 
 " Reincarnation is, I understand, a doctrine invented 
 for the purpose of solving the problem of evil in this 
 life. It simply puts it back into another one and 
 leaves it there. This doctrine cribbed from the 
 Pythagoreans has been exposed by Aristotle " (Pramp 
 frequently made little mistakes in detail, but as he 
 justly reflected, such allusions did not matter when you 
 could bet your boots that none of your audience had 
 read Aristotle), " and is now imposed upon a credulous 
 age tired of its own religion, and like the Athenians 
 ready to swallow whoever and whatever savours of 
 novelty." 
 
 The parallel with the Athenians was further exempli- 
 
 132
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 fied by the persons of the Theosophists themselves. 
 Who were they ? 
 
 The Theosophists were mainly composed of well-to- 
 do ladies with plenty of leisure, who, having just too 
 much intelligence to be satisfied with calling on one 
 another and tea-table gossip about their friends, turned 
 instead in their unoccupied afternoons to Theosophy 
 and gossip about God. They were sufficiently fashion- 
 able to desire to appear unorthodox by professing a 
 smattering of science, but were rendered by their 
 laziness incapable of submitting to that mental dis- 
 cipline which the mastery of any branch of knowledge 
 involved. They turned from the mythology of the 
 Church and dogmas about Christ to the visions of Mrs. 
 Besant and dogmas about Karma. In order to attract 
 people of this class, Theosophy had invented a regular 
 mythology of spirit demons and Great White Masters, 
 constructed after the fashion of the hierarchy on 
 Olympus invented by the Greeks and the regiments of 
 saints canonized by the Roman Catholics. All this 
 rigmarole about astral planes and auras and attendant 
 spirits was, in fact, precisely on a par with the anthropo- 
 morphic myths which form the necessary window- 
 dressing of any religion. Theosophy was therefore 
 essentially the resort of second-class minds. The 
 Theosophist said in effect : " All these first-class 
 philosophers and scientists are engaged in speculations 
 and researches which it is beyond the force of my inade- 
 quate reason to follow. I am therefore at a disadvan- 
 tage with them inasmuch as they appear to possess 
 facts and to comprehend theories as to the nature of life 
 and immortality, which I do not. But I can put my- 
 self on a level with these men by inventing an explana- 
 tion of the Universe on my own account. It is true 
 
 133
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 that I shall not be able to understand it, but then no 
 more will anyone else I can always say that religious 
 truths are too high for understanding while if I make 
 it sufficiently pretentious and unintelligible, it will 
 attract all sorts of people who desire the reputation of 
 being intellectual. 
 
 " Theosophy, like all forms of mysticism, was there- 
 fore the shield of mediocre minds, a device to protect 
 their self-respect in face of the superior intelligence of 
 others. Like all forms of mysticism it was the refuge of 
 the devout when their orthodoxy had been exploded. 
 Like all kinds of religion it arose from the desire to 
 lick the boots of some higher power." 
 
 Hereupon Pramp sat down amid somewhat mixed 
 noises. The crudity and violence of his utterances 
 provoked dissent ; besides, thought Daisy, it was all 
 so barren and destructive. 
 
 She appeared, however, sufficiently impressed, if 
 ruffled, at the rough handling of a doctrine to which 
 she professed devoted allegiance. 
 
 " You ought to meet more Theosophists," she said, 
 " to find out how far from the truth most of your asser- 
 tions about them are. They are mostly quite humble 
 unassuming people who make no attempt to proselytize 
 or to throw their religion in other people's faces." 
 
 " That only shows their cunning. They don't want 
 the reputation of fanatics, and they know that with 
 most they would fail. You see most people are too 
 wrapt up in money making or golf playing to pay any 
 attention to the number of their souls and the colour of 
 their auras." 
 
 " But there are always some who have escaped from 
 the religion they have been brought up in, and are 
 open to new ideas." 
 
 '34
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 " Not many. People's minds don't seem to run much 
 into oddities of ideas. When they want to be odd they 
 invent some quaint form of amusement like diabolo or 
 roller-skating, or throw off something unexpected in 
 the way of food like standard bread, though the 
 latter had a fringe of something like doctrine round it." 
 
 " Well, you go and stay with Theosophists and see 
 what they are like," said Daisy. 
 
 " Not if they are going to feed me on nuts and 
 grass," returned Pramp. 
 
 The eloquence and malice Pramp had exhibited in 
 his attack on Theosophy gained him a certain ascen- 
 dancy in the ranks of the Mivians, who were always on 
 the watch for promising young men. Though the 
 interests, pretensions and, in fact, the very raison 
 d'etre of these good people were presumably intellec- 
 tual, though Mivianism denoted the adoption of a 
 certain political theory, a sympathy with Socialism 
 and a knowledge of Political Economy, it was noticeable 
 that they struck the observer more by their kindness of 
 heart than by their soundness of head. They were not 
 on the whole particularly clever people ; their educa- 
 tion was shoddy, and their showy acquaintance with 
 the latest works on Eugenics, and their smattering of 
 Syndicalism or Guild Socialism was very different from 
 that patient marshalling of facts or acute criticism of 
 social institutions which had made their leaders 
 famous. But they were, especially the young women 
 from Manchester and kindred Universities, pre- 
 eminently good-hearted people, high spirited, enthu- 
 siastic and not particularly gifted. 
 
 Thus Pramp, who had an Oxford polish, as the 
 Mivians phrased it, soon achieved prominence. He 
 wrote and stage-managed a cinema play, prosecuted in 
 
 135
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 a mock trial, delivered a lecture on the sex question 
 and pursued Daisy. 
 
 3 
 At the back of the caravanserai the ground rose 
 
 steeply up for nearly a thousand feet. The lower 
 parts of the slope were covered with trees ; the upper 
 half was heather through which the climber could, if he 
 chose, make his way to the top. He rarely took the 
 trouble to do this, because the top, instead of being a 
 scheduled peak the ascent of which could be com- 
 memorated as an achievement, was a flat tableland 
 covered with heather and very boggy. Just where the 
 trees ended and before the heather began, was a little 
 cuplike hollow through which ran a mountain stream. 
 Flowers grew there, the grass was soft and mossy, 
 and a number of huge boulders scattered over the floor 
 of the hollow countenanced the legend that the Stone 
 men or was it the Druids ? had once made of it a 
 head-quarters for sacrifice and worship. 
 
 Clearly a resort of wood nymphs and fauns at some 
 earlier period that is for these genial creatures had 
 not survived the close proximity of modern Mivians. 
 Drainage statistics have power to exorcise even the 
 hardiest faun, and the only inhabitants of the place at 
 the moment were Pramp and Daisy, who had climbed 
 there on a hot afternoon with intentions which, so far 
 at least as Pramp was concerned, were not out of keep- 
 ing with the spirit of the place. 
 
 Pramp had been talking for some time : the subject 
 of his discourse, it seemed, was love. A platonic friend- 
 ship, he thought, between men and women was impos- 
 sible. It was a fiction based on the hypocrisies of a 
 civilization too ashamed of its passions to avow them. 
 Either it lapsed into coldness and mutual dislike, or it 
 
 136
 
 
 developed into something different, which was, to say 
 the least of it, not platonic. 
 
 Daisy and himself were emancipated. They had 
 the courage of their convictions and, he hoped, of 
 their desires. They saw the wisdom of their elders 
 as a collection of middle-class conventions based on 
 timidity. They would not let the so-called wisdom 
 of others stifle their own interests. Or would they ? 
 He appealed to Daisy. 
 
 Daisy supposed that it might be all right if they loved 
 one another. But what about Miss Parkin and the 
 others ? It would never do for them to know. They 
 were so dreadfully proper. 
 
 " Oh, Miss Parkin be damned," said Pramp. " Can- 
 tankerous old cat ! Who cares what she thinks ? 
 She doesn't know anything and she can suspect what 
 she likes. She is sure to talk about us behind our 
 backs, anyhow." 
 
 " How very unpleasant ! I hate people backbiting 
 me when my back is turned." 
 
 " Backbiting behind your back is all right. I often 
 do it myself. That's what backs are for. But I never 
 backbite anyone to their face. Nor does Miss Parkin. 
 She daren't. Let her go to the devil, anyhow." 
 
 " But she is so very outspoken ; she doesn't mind 
 what she says to one. She rather likes telling people 
 home truths." 
 
 " I know she has a knack of telling home truths ; but 
 she doesn't bring them home." 
 
 " Not at the time perhaps ; but they arrive a little 
 later when you're not looking, and rankle." 
 
 "Rankle, rankle little truth, 
 
 Planted in the heart of youth," 
 said Pramp fatuously. 
 
 137
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " Oh, Arthur, don't be clever," pleaded Daisy. 
 " How can you be on an afternoon like this ? " 
 
 " I don't want to be clever. I want you. But you 
 started arguing, dear. Why should we argue F I am 
 always arguing. To-day I want something different. 
 Won't you say yes ? " 
 
 Daisy supposed again that it might be all right. 
 She was also heard to mutter something about marriage. 
 But she did not wish to prolong the conversation. She 
 only wished that Arthur would stop talking. Cer- 
 tainly it was very hot this afternoon : she felt that 
 she had been here with her lover sometime before a 
 long time ago she wondered when it could have been. 
 Something rather pleasant had happened to her. Why 
 couldn't she remember, and why couldn't Arthur stop 
 talking ? 
 
 But the half-caught word marriage had set him off 
 again. Pramp was a very foolish lover. He thought 
 Daisy liked him for his brains, and that he must 
 continually display them for her benefit. 
 
 Unfortunately for Daisy it happened that he had 
 delivered only the night before his great lecture on the 
 Sex Question, in the course of which he served up to 
 the unsuspecting Mivians great slabs of undiluted 
 George Bernard and Herbert George, culling indis- 
 criminately from the text of certain well-known 
 prefaces and novels, disguising the whole under a thin 
 veil of Oxford manner, and varying it with a few 
 epigrams from other writers. He had actually suc- 
 ceeded in shocking some of the more tender-minded by 
 arguments and quotations from George Bernard, the 
 Mivian bible, which proved, he said, his assertion that 
 it was like every other bible in that nobody had ever 
 taken the trouble to read it.
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 Pramp was therefore inconveniently full of words 
 just at the moment on the subject of marriage. Mar- 
 riage, he asserted, had nothing to do with the matter. 
 Marriage was simply a ceremony, of which the object 
 was to give Oriental possession to the man and economic 
 guarantees to the woman. It had no connexion with 
 love, except that the artificial bonds of marriage usually 
 killed it. If love was a disease, marriage was a sana- 
 torium for the cure of it. Had she not read George 
 Bernard on the subject ? He had proved to demon- 
 stration in his Prefaces that marriage was a primitive 
 survival, and family life a corrupt institution inimical 
 to love and happiness. 
 
 Daisy should read George Bernard. He would open 
 her eyes. One day, of course, circumstances might 
 arise which rendered marriage necessary. Daisy would 
 of course have a reputation to keep up, and that must 
 be safeguarded in the event of possible contingencies. 
 Meanwhile Daisy was too clever to marry. Only 
 stupid women made good wives, and it was only the 
 wide diffusion of stupidity among women that made 
 marriage as successful as it was. Now Daisy was not 
 a fool : and Wycherly had said that a man is a fool 
 who marries, but a greater who does not marry a fool. 
 Anyway, they should at least get to know one another 
 thoroughly first. They must experiment with each 
 other, see one another under all sorts of circumstances 
 before embarking on such a big adventure. Mean- 
 while what was the use of talking ? He loved her. 
 Wouldn't she show her love for him ? Nobody was 
 likely to come here. The Mivians had gone for a long 
 excursion, all the young ones that is, and the old ones 
 were too fat to climb up. They were quite safe from 
 disturbance, and in love. . . . 
 
 *39
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Just as the indigenous faun was returning to his old 
 haunts attracted by a low laugh which sounded to him 
 familiar the place, it seemed, was being given over to 
 its old uses he was startled by the sound of a puffing 
 noise coming up the hill. Being a creature friendly to 
 lovers, he uttered a warning cry which startled them 
 just in time to enable them to meet old Dowson with- 
 out an undue amount of disarray. 
 
 4 
 
 Luckily the state of old Dowson's lungs was such 
 that he had given ample notice of his arrival. He 
 advertised the fact that he was climbing uphill by a 
 noise midway between a wheezy bellows and a dissipated 
 steam-engine. So consciously unconscious of anything 
 being up was the appearance of the lovers, that anyone 
 but a lawyer would have guessed what was up, and 
 discreetly retired. 
 
 Mr. A. E. Dowson showed no signs of retiring. 
 Preceded by a discreet cough, he continued to bear 
 down upon them. 
 
 " Damn ! " said Pramp. 
 
 Mr. Dowson was a barrister and an assize judge, 
 who had collected a small fortune and a reputation for 
 clemency, the first by getting himself briefed by the 
 wealthy to secure sentences of several years' imprison- 
 ment upon labourers who killed their salmon or their 
 pheasants, and the second by letting the same labourers 
 off with several weeks for half-beating their wives to 
 death. During the years of his practice he had 
 developed such an interest in his own utterances that 
 when he retired he had felt constrained to join the 
 Mivians, thus obtaining at one stroke a good audience 
 for himself and a place in the van of the country's 
 
 140
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 thought. A conversion to Socialism was considered 
 remarkable in a man of his years, and now that the days 
 of his money making were over, could do him no harm. 
 
 His themes once varied had now crystallized into 
 two, his sayings in the law courts where he earned his 
 money, and his doings in Italian inns where he spent it. 
 His genius for diverting the most varied streams of con- 
 versation into one of these two channels was amazing. 
 
 " Hullo, you children," said Mr. Dowson, " you look 
 very happy. I hope I am not inappropriate." 
 
 Pramp thought some explanation demanded. 
 
 " Yes ! We've just decided to be engaged," he said. 
 
 " Engaged ! That's splendid. Now take my advice 
 and get married quickly. I don't approve of long 
 engagements. I remember prosecuting in a breach of 
 promise case where the engagement had lasted ten 
 years : defence pleaded that engagement still held ; but 
 I maintained that if a man had kept a girl dangling ten 
 years he never meant to marry her, didn't ought to 
 marry her, and wasn't fit to marry her was the case 
 too ! " 
 
 " Oh, we may never get married at all. Engage- 
 ments are simply devices to secure the pleasures of 
 marriage without its responsibilities ; at least, that's 
 our view." 
 
 " Take care you don't come a cropper. I've seen 
 too many of these irregular Mivian unions between 
 young people who considered themselves wiser than 
 the traditions of their ancestors and stronger than the 
 usages of society. Luckily most of the women don't 
 believe the stuff they talk about the immorality of 
 marriage and all that. As a matter of fact, the little 
 dears are all dying with anxiety to get married. That's 
 the only explanation of how any of them do get 
 
 141
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 married. Wants some explanation too, when you come 
 to look at 'em ! Where are you going for your honey- 
 moon ? " 
 
 " We haven't thought of that yet," said Daisy. 
 
 " You can't do better than do what I and my wife 
 did. Take the boat to Calais and the train to Lausanne 
 (don't stop in Paris by the way) ; spend a week cross- 
 ing the Alps and come down into Italy for Christmas. 
 Now when you get to Porto Fino, which you must be 
 sure to do on Christmas Day itself, you will go to the 
 inn there, there is only one inn, and you will ask to see 
 the landlady, remarkably handsome woman too, but 
 wait till you see her daguhter before you think about 
 that ! " 
 
 " But weren't you on your honeymoon then ? " 
 
 " Yes ! But I always had an eye for a fine woman. 
 When you have had your omelette and Chianti you will 
 go and bathe, and if you had the glorious day that I had, 
 you can dry yourself in the sun. Think of that, on 
 Christmas Day ! And after that, if you are wise you'll 
 stay at the inn at Porto Fino till you have to come 
 back ! Never have I known such food ! " 
 
 " Did you ? " 
 
 " No, my wife insisted on going on to Rome. My 
 wife is an expert on painting. We are always having 
 artists at our house. Some of the leading men of the 
 day come to consult her. Just before we were married 
 she had a rebirth in Italian art, and nothing would 
 satisfy her but a visit to that Vatican place, or is it the 
 Uffizi Gallery ? " 
 
 " That's in Florence," said Daisy. 
 
 " Well, never mind : she wanted to see pictures, 
 anyway. I told her that I wouldn't leave a superb 
 little place like Porto Fino to go to a nasty, noisy slum 
 
 142
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 like Rome for all the daubs in the world. But she had 
 her way I told you we were just married. 
 
 " ' Well,' I told her, ' we'll catch the midnight train 
 to Rome and arrive at nine in the morning. We will 
 stay there exactly eight hours until the evening train, 
 and we will then go away.' ' 
 
 " And you went away ? " 
 
 " No, we stayed a week, and I'm not sorry now. 
 You won't be either." 
 
 " That depends on whether we have a rebirth in 
 Italian art." 
 
 " It's very curious, you know, what people will do 
 to see pictures. Now I defended a man once . . ." 
 But here Pramp managed to frustrate him by appealing 
 to a vow he had made to get to the top of the hill 
 before dinner, a feat denied to Mr. Dowson's scanty 
 supply of wind. 
 
 " What an old bore ! " said Daisy. 
 
 " Well, I shocked him a bit last night, I think, and 
 now he is getting his own back. It is as much the 
 privilege of the old to bore the young as of the young 
 to shock the old." 
 
 " They take advantage of it much oftener, anyway." 
 
 " That's because we are so often dependent on them 
 for supplies, and are prepared to open our ears to their 
 rubbish provided we may open our pockets to their 
 cash." 
 
 There was a lovely sunset, the view from the top was 
 magnificent, and Pramp very much in love. Under 
 these conditions let it be said to his credit that he felt 
 sentimental. His sentiments we will not stop to 
 describe : let it suffice that they were appropriate. 
 Real feeling is not a suitable subject for literature : its 
 expression being almost invariably commonplace. The 
 
 H3
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 man who is about to be murdered expresses himself 
 in the cliches of the penny dreadful ; the finer frenzies 
 of the human spirit boil over in the words of Florence 
 Barclay. Besides the lovers, descending sooner or 
 later to a vegetarian dinner at the Caravanserai, sub- 
 dued their tongues to the principles of sane dieting 
 and their stomachs to the assimilation of nut pie. It 
 would be unkind to perpetuate bathos. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 Pramp and Daisy were now continually together. 
 The high proportion of unmarried ladies among the 
 Mivians was in itself sufficient guarantee that the 
 intimacy would not pass without comment. The 
 commotion caused among the virgin dovecots by 
 Pramp's lecture on the sex question, in which he had 
 openly advocated unlimited facility for experiment 
 before the marriage tie was ever, if at all, irrevocably 
 bound, led to a general speculation upon his inten- 
 tions, and among the majority, to the surmise that 
 they were not all they should be. 
 
 Miss Parkin in particular, with the care of Mivian 
 damsels ever close at heart, and alive to her responsibi- 
 lities as supervisor not only of the food, sanitary 
 arrangements and accounts, but also of the morals of 
 the party, was heard to aver that she " never did trust 
 Mr. Pramp from the first, and did not like the way he 
 was carrying on with that Miss Trail." The reputa- 
 tion of Mivian gatherings, it seemed, had been so com- 
 promised in the early days by the inconsiderateness of 
 those who had insisted on putting the calculated 
 Mivian contempt for convention into practice, that 
 Miss Parkin felt herself justified in repressing with a 
 stern hand any unconventionality which was not con- 
 ventional enough to stop at theories. 
 
 144
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 The men, however, in the main followed Oscar 
 Wilde in thinking that discovery constituted the only 
 sin. There were times when they gathered late at 
 night to proclaim their manhood by a greater freedom 
 of conversation (it may here be noted that one of the 
 greatest crises in the society had occurred when cer- 
 tain young ladies, convinced of the necessity for main- 
 taining the equality of the sexes, had insisted on their 
 right to be present on these occasions, and being ad- 
 mitted had expressed great annoyance at the failure of 
 the conversation to come up to their expectations) 
 when Pramp was advised as a young man to range 
 abroad and enjoy himself as he listed, provided 
 appearances were maintained and married women 
 eschewed. 
 
 The most sedate Mivians were known to exhibit a 
 mysterious doggishness at such times. Old Dowson, 
 for instance, was wont to expatiate on the extensive 
 practice of secrecy on the part of polite society with 
 regard to affairs of the heart. Every evening he would 
 point his theory by a fresh flower of experience culled 
 from his own practice. 
 
 " You wouldn't think how widespread this promis- 
 cuity is, unless you had seen inside. I prosecuted a 
 young woman once who had just produced a child and 
 was receiving ten shillings a week from five different 
 men at once, four of them officers, each of whom 
 thought it was his. She, of course, assured them it was, 
 and extorted the money as a sort of blackmail by threat- 
 ening to declare the child's parentage. As a matter of 
 fact, she was married all the time and the child was 
 her husband's." 
 
 " What did you prosecute for ? " 
 
 " For obtaining money under false pretences." 
 
 K
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 " But I suppose each of the men had reason to enter- 
 tain a fear on the subject ? " 
 
 " Of course they had ! " 
 
 " Well, then," rejoined Pramp, " I fail to see how 
 the story proves the importance of this secrecy you 
 lawyers advocate." 
 
 " Why, you can bet your boots that not one of them 
 would have paid her a farthing had he known that the 
 others were paying too. Each believed himself the 
 sole violator of the shrine, and she naturally kept each 
 in ignorance of the others. That's the advantage of 
 secrecy to a woman." 
 
 " And to a man ? " 
 
 " Oh, he must keep up appearances at all cost. Pro- 
 vided his peccadilloes are sicklied o'er by the pale cast 
 of respectability, the world requires nothing more. 
 Any hotel will take you in and ask no questions pro- 
 vided the lady wears a wedding ring." 
 
 Dowson's anecdote gave rise to the usual emulation 
 among those who sought to cap it by the inevitable 
 narration or invention of amours of their own. Pramp 
 retired to bed wondering wherein could a difference be 
 perceived between the atmosphere of a Mivian com- 
 mon-room when ladies were excluded and of a hotel 
 commercial room, between Mivian males with all 
 their high thinking and State moulding, and commer- 
 cial travellers, business men, and journalists, boring 
 each other with their private salacities in the smoking- 
 room of their golf club. 
 
 5 
 
 With the coming of the autumn and the war, Pramp 
 was installed in a riverside flat near Charing Cross, and 
 set out to lead the life of a respectable young publisher. 
 
 146
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 He looked forward to a bumpy and eventful exist- 
 ence. To be sure he was living alone, and the prospect 
 of the undisturbed contemplation of his own soul dur- 
 ing solitary evenings in his flat did not, on the strength 
 of the passing glimpses he had already had of that 
 immortal commodity, inspire him with cheerfulness. 
 
 But intending as he did to live the life of a strenuous 
 young Mivian, he would not suffer from the ennui of 
 many evenings in his own company. On Monday, for 
 instance, he would be at the rooms of the Mivian Re- 
 constructionists, where people were leisurely engaged in 
 inquiring into the salaries received by the classes and 
 the masses, with a view to calculating how much every- 
 body would get all round if salaries were pooled. 
 
 On Tuesday he would attend one of a series of lec- 
 tures on " Women after the War." 
 
 Wednesday, failing any serious kind of play, dealing 
 with the problems preferably the sex problems 
 of modern life, he would relax to a music-hall. These 
 plays, however, seemed to have lapsed since the war. 
 Thursday he would devote to writing his Mivian Tract 
 on " The Socialism of the Mystics with a special refer- 
 ence to Collectivist thought in Plotinus and Por- 
 phyry." On Friday he would visit friends. The 
 week-ends would be taken up by Mivian walking 
 parties into the country. 
 
 It is difficult to measure the extent to which Pramp 
 failed to carry out this programme. In choosing the 
 career of a publisher he had not been led by an irresist- 
 ible call. It had not been a case of publishing or 
 nothing. Rather he had drifted into it from the lack 
 of a definite objective, looking at it as a good vantage- 
 ground whence to jump off into an astonished and 
 gratified world, 
 
 H7
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 As a writer on social and literary subjects Pramp was 
 gradually to acquire a reputation. The office was to 
 provide him with an income during the initial stages of 
 obscurity. Undoubtedly a time would come one day 
 when his literary fame would be sufficient to afford him 
 a respectable income. Then he would cease to publish 
 the books of others, and use the knowledge he had gained 
 to over-reach the publishers who published his own. 
 
 For the time, however, the office was to be regarded 
 as a convenient device to prevent him, as a young 
 thinker for whom the world might not yet be ready, 
 from starving in a garret in the usual way. It would 
 provide him with a competency and a core to his day, 
 but not with a career. His aspirations centred round 
 his work in the evening. Whether it was finally as a 
 leader of Labour under Mivian auspices or as a writer 
 of novels he was to shine, he was not as yet sure. 
 
 Meanwhile, thanks to the office, he could afford to 
 wait and show himself open to encouragement in either 
 direction. 
 
 There have been worse schemes. As a plan of action 
 for a young man it was ambitious ; but its ambition 
 was not too great to preclude practicability. One 
 influence alone had been left out of the reckoning : the 
 unexpected effect of life in London. 
 
 Pramp had often wondered how anyone could read 
 a book in London, and now he found the task entirely 
 beyond him, while as for writing . . . 
 
 There was chatter enough about art and literature. 
 One passed from a Mivian meeting to a concert, from 
 a concert to the poetry bookshop. One read number- 
 less reviews ; one was continually hearing criticisms 
 of this or that writer ; one went to music-halls ; one 
 accumulated a vast medley of impressions. One was 
 
 148
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 continually being stimulated ; so continually, in fact, 
 that to concentrate was impossible. It was impossible 
 to sort one's impressions, for before any impression 
 could be grasped it was wiped out by the next. Hard 
 and sustained reading such as Pramp had known in his 
 Oxford days seemed impossible ; but novels were read 
 in plenty, and so were pamphlets. The Mivians he 
 met had smatterings of every aspect of Philosophy and 
 Political Economy. They could gossip not unintelli- 
 gently about the most difficult and abstruse questions, 
 but nobody seemed to have any definite knowledge. 
 None were thoroughly acquainted with any branch of 
 study. At Oxford the most obscure don was an expert in 
 something, were it only Cretan vases or Greek enclitics. 
 Here everybody was an amateur in everything. 
 
 And London was lonely, and loneliness, instead of 
 stimulating Pramp to write, made writing impossible. 
 It was not the kind of loneliness that is usually ascribed 
 to London, the loneliness of crowds which Gissing and 
 Mark Rutherford portray. Pramp knew stacks of 
 people, but it was such an effort to see them. At 
 Oxford the men one knew lived on the next staircase 
 or at furthest a street or two away, and dropped in 
 without invitation. In London it took one such a long 
 time travelling to see people, that there was no time 
 left to see them when you arrived, while people never 
 dropped in without appointments, partly because of 
 the increased formality of life, even more because of the 
 risk of finding the friend out, and the length and 
 tediousness of the bootless journey. 
 
 Pramp found that he could not bear to retire to his 
 flat at six o'clock and settle to a solitary evening. Con- 
 sequently he deliberately tried to fill the place with 
 people, and his evenings with engagements, and serious 
 
 149
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 endeavour on Mivian lines was thrown to the winds. 
 The thing got on his nerves to such an extent that the 
 most important aim in life came to be the making of 
 arrangements to take up every available moment of 
 the blank stretches of week-end. The most awful fate 
 that could befall him was to be left alone in London 
 on Sunday. Leicester Square on a Sunday morning 
 appeared the most morbid and sinister place he had 
 ever seen. The dust, the paper littering the streets, 
 the unnatural silence, the unlovely appearance of the 
 little Soho restaurants set off family life and relational 
 Sundays as a veritable Elysium. This dread of being 
 in the heart of London especially on a Sunday, with so 
 many layers of houses and humans between himself 
 and the country his flat in the " Adelphi " might be 
 considered to be London's very navel finally drove 
 Pramp into digs on Hampstead Heath with Bright, 
 of The Treasury, an Oxford acquaintance who, with 
 cheery heartiness, did his best to reconcile Pramp to his 
 life in town. But our hero remained disgruntled. He 
 complained of a lack of dignity in his life. 
 
 " Just think for a moment," he grumbled to Bright, 
 " what our days consist of : with breakfast half-digested 
 we step from our digs into the tube, from the tube to 
 the office, from the office out to lunch, from lunch back 
 to the office ; in the evening, again to the tube and so 
 back to the digs with minds too jaded for anything 
 beyond an evening paper and chatter about food, 
 tobacco or sport, with bridge or billiards to finish up 
 the evening. Do you know that for the first time in 
 my life I have taken to reading the newspapers ? " 
 
 " That is very serious news. May I ask why you 
 deliberately force your mind down to the low level 
 necessary for their consumption ? " 
 
 150
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 " Simply because I never have the time or leisure 
 in London in which to read a book. I can't enjoy a 
 book in the tube : a masterpiece should not be insulted 
 by such degradation, and as anything is better than 
 the uninterrupted contemplation of the faces of 
 business men ranged in front, I interpose the news- 
 paper." 
 
 " You're not very reasonable, Pramp ! First you 
 complain of lack of dignity, and then you deliberately 
 lower yours by reading newspapers." 
 
 " It is not an active choice : it's thrust on one by 
 herd instinct. The influence of the herd is omnipre- 
 sent in London. Why, for instance, does one always 
 hurry ? There is, alas ! no explanation. One can 
 simply record the fact. Irrespective of the urgencies 
 of appointments or the claims of leisure, the eternal 
 difference remains : at Oxford one lounges or one runs. 
 In London one just hurries." 
 
 " We can't walk as slowly as we used to. You forget 
 we are not so young as we were." 
 
 " You mean we are now the slaves of our duties and 
 our pleasures." 
 
 " You are right, and I don't know which servitude 
 is the more intolerable, but this is not the life we chose 
 when we went into an office. We plumped for com- 
 fort and for security. We did not expect interest or 
 excitement, and we certainly don't get it. But we did 
 expect a life of leisure, and here we are spending our 
 days chivvying about like a couple of stockbroker's 
 clerks, after lunching on grass at the ' Smile Nour- 
 isher.' We have sold our souls for a mess of pottage, 
 and we have not even got the mess ; we have given up 
 literary ambitions, fame and the privilege of being 
 unhappy in a romantic kind of way for the certainty
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 of being bored in a commonplace office, and we have 
 gained nothing at all." 
 
 " Nonsense. I will tell you what you have gained : 
 intellectual rest. I am in the Civil Service, and in con- 
 sequence I am free from the necessity of thinking either 
 about my work or my income. I have to do certain 
 stated things in certain stated ways for a definite period 
 each day. This gives me an occupation, prevents me 
 from being introspective, and leaves my mind at rest. 
 The office is as necessary to me as a baby is to a woman, 
 and the reaction makes me almost intelligent in the 
 evening." 
 
 " I am glad you are so easily satisfied. I am not. I 
 want activity." 
 
 " Well, put on a pair of shorts and come for a run on 
 the Heath with me before breakfast." 
 
 " I am damned if I will ! " said Pramp, and went to 
 bed in a settled gloom. 
 
 As this was perhaps the most miserable period of our 
 hero's life, we may be forgiven for taking a glance at 
 him during one of his most acute moments of depres- 
 sion, thus gaining an insight into the nature of our hero 
 and of the civilization which produced him. The 
 moment is a typical one. Pramp is at lunch. He is 
 lunching at a chop-house with his friend Bright, and 
 he is comparing the demerits of this particular estab- 
 lishment with those of alternative ones. The place is 
 insufferably overheated. There is a delay of twenty 
 minutes in bringing his steak : the waitresses are too 
 few, overworked, and consequently ill-tempered. The 
 air is full of a buzz of conversation, interspersed with 
 the champing noises made by the jaws of the business 
 men who form an impenetrable hedge around. They 
 are talking of successful deals, of their neighbours' 
 
 152
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 chickens, of the family holiday at Eastbourne, or of their 
 allotments ; the while they are stolidly stoking their 
 stomachs with ill-cooked food to pile up that energy 
 and initiative which has made them the backbone of 
 the nation. Their faces may be observed to glow with 
 complacent satisfaction as they reflect upon the coming 
 occupations of the afternoon. A will buy some car- 
 pets in China at price X, and sell them to B in New 
 York at price Y. If Y normally exceeds X, A will be a 
 successful business man ; if not, not. In either event 
 A will never see the carpets in which he deals, such are 
 the resources of modern civilization ! And now Pramp, 
 tired of steaks, is lunching at the celebrated vegetarian 
 restaurant, the " Smile Nourisher." Meat is here 
 eschewed on high principle, and nuts eaten on empty 
 pockets ; while tracts on Occultism, Vegetarianism and 
 Theosophy, placed prominently on the tables, are in- 
 tended at once to edify the mind and to divert the 
 attention from the unappetizing nature of the fare. 
 Even the menus are instructive, and the bill of fare 
 is headed by such startling announcements as, 
 " Health is a Religion," " Constipation is the Thief 
 of Time," " Beans and Brains," and so forth. The 
 customers are mainly anaemic clerks, the majority 
 being women who, finding their purses too slender 
 for a steak, are bravely endeavouring to apply on 
 an extensive scale the proverb concerning sour 
 grapes, and to content themselves with eggs and 
 nuts. 
 
 This much, at least, may be said for a grass diet it is 
 cheaper than a flesh one, and the soupcon of soul that 
 clings to and envelopes the " Smile Nourisher " like a 
 mystic cloud, mingling indescribably with the smell of 
 obsolete proteids, makes it possible to lunch there with 
 
 153
 
 perfect propriety on a shilling, without loss of caste or 
 admission of poverty. 
 
 In addition to the respectably poor, there are those 
 who interpret the doctrine of evolution so literally that 
 they hold it to be immoral, if not cannibal, to take 
 animal life. All fads are at bottom luxuries dependent 
 upon the possession of independent means. You can- 
 not wear sandals if you have to earn your living in an 
 office, or make strike speeches if you have to earn it in a 
 Government Department ; and you can only believe 
 in the sanctity of animal life if you can afford a digestion 
 which is proof against the " Smile Nourisher." Most 
 of the patrons of this second class, then, are well off. 
 They are queer-looking people with long beards, raw 
 noses, flat chests and inexpressibly clean hands with 
 immaculate finger-nails. When they are not engaged 
 in asking one another whether they propose to attend 
 Mr. Wopenheimer's lecture on " Some Occult Aspects 
 of the War," or what they think of Miss Truby's " The 
 Astral meaning of Digestion," they are occupied in 
 reading journals of incredible obscurity which are 
 never to be seen outside the " Smile Nourisher," and 
 are believed by some to be printed on the premises. 
 Such are the Guardians' Review, Straight Talks on 
 Constipation, and Cheer, the journal of the Spirit 
 Society. The proprietor, a well-known prize fighter 
 who has grown prosperous and rich on vegetables, 
 though never actually visible, is always felt as a kind of 
 atmosphere in the background. He is known to be 
 lecturing in an hour, or to have just finished his 
 physical drill class. One has an intimation that he is 
 always at call, ready to come forward with helpful 
 suggestions and advice on anything from cheese 
 melettes to pedicure. 
 
 '54
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 Is this, then, Pramp's milieu ? It scarcely seems so. 
 And as he pounds along the Strand to his publishing- 
 house full of proteids and wind he is reminded of Gas- 
 ton's quip, " You can always propagate a propaganda if 
 you have the proper geese." And the Mivians too ? 
 Were they geese ? No ! This would never do. Social- 
 ism was important ; he must hold fast to that at all costs ! 
 
 6 
 
 Christmas was spent by Pramp and Daisy at the 
 Caravanserai. Owing to its unusual success this insti- 
 tution had been opened in the winter to give Mivians 
 the opportunity of again enjoying the sweets of one 
 another's society, this time without any leavening of 
 the palatable mess by the introduction of lectures or 
 study. They were to play games, go walks, debate, 
 sing, and indulge in charades and play-readings. 
 
 The Mivians, who were attracted to this gathering 
 attended from a mixture of motives, in which, it is to 
 be feared, the desire for that intellectual stimulation 
 which it was one of the chief purposes of the society to 
 administer, formed an insignificant part. Some, im- 
 bued with the writings of George Bernard and despis- 
 ing their families at all times, despised in them noth- 
 ing more than that tradition which, locating the seat of 
 human affection in the stomach, sought to cement the 
 bonds of family unity once a year by gathering together 
 the component members for the purpose of over- 
 eating. They had not read Dickens, and did not there- 
 fore understand that kindliness and joviality are to be 
 welcomed whatever their source, even when they are 
 mere earthy humours springing from a basis no less solid 
 than an accumulation of roast beef and plum pudding. 
 
 But the Mivians numbered among themselves not 
 
 155
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 those only who were too good for family life, but those 
 who were not good enough. Family outcasts, those 
 whose homes had disowned them, and those who had no 
 home to go to, found in the prevailing scorn of rela- 
 tions a compensation for the slights which had been 
 imposed on them. Their families would have none of 
 them. It was natural, then, and pleasant enough to call 
 " sour grapes " at their families, and attend the Mivian 
 Caravanserai. 
 
 Pramp, of course, went to meet Daisy ; Daisy to 
 meet Pramp. 
 
 Despite the fact that there were no lectures, nor 
 indeed any attempt to instruct the assembled Mivians, 
 the proceedings at Christmas lacked for Pramp a good 
 deal of the light-hearted gaiety of his summer visit. 
 
 Pramp and Daisy ascended Great Gable one day, 
 and got nearly frozen for their pains, lunching on the 
 top. Miss Parkin had indigestion, and her government 
 betrayed a corresponding harshness. 
 
 Even flirting with Daisy, Pramp found, had rather 
 lost its zest as a public performance. 
 
 An atmosphere of suspicion and hostility began 
 vaguely to make itself felt, and amorous innuendoes 
 withered in its unfriendly blight. Driven in extremity 
 to kissing in corridors at night, they both caught 
 dreadful colds. 
 
 Miss Parkin and her confederates were at bottom 
 incredibly censorious. They were ageing, and the 
 inevitable pressure of over-ripe virginity prevented the 
 conventional tolerance they had picked up as part of 
 their Mivian gospel from striking any deeper than the 
 bristles on their chins. In sex matters they loathed all 
 broad-mindedness except its reputation, and when 
 Pramp and Daisy, after leading unexpectedly blameless
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 lives during their stay, left together on a visit to her 
 people at Liverpool, they knew that they had implanted 
 the seed of scandal in Mivian bosoms, and might justly 
 fear that the growths therefrom would spread with 
 sufficient strength and venom to drive them into 
 matrimony itself. 
 
 It was not long before this happened. On his return 
 to London Pramp learnt from each Mivian in turn the 
 dreadful stories the other Mivians were spreading about 
 Daisy and himself. As a topic of general interest it shot 
 like a meteor across the Mivian horizon, and for the 
 period of a month threatened to eclipse in interest 
 the war itself. The result proved a strain for both. 
 Having read the last book of the New Machiavelli, they 
 were pleased to compare themselves to Remington and 
 Isabel. 
 
 Literary familiarity with the ensuing phenomena did 
 not, however, mitigate their unpleasantness. Scandal 
 blows out love's lantern and leaves the wick to smoke. 
 They found themselves stifling in an atmosphere that 
 Mivian broad-mindedness had created. 
 
 They were married from Pramp's digs in Hampshire, 
 to the accompaniment of jubilation and flippancy on 
 the part of the select band that accompanied them to 
 the Registry Office. They were still childish enough to 
 rejoice at Pramp's appearance for the ceremony in a 
 sweater, and the resultant dismay of the Registrar and 
 his clerk. 
 
 Expecting so little from marriage, they were exces- 
 sively surprised to find it gave them so much. It could 
 hardly help surpassing the expectations they had 
 formed of it ; but it did this so completely that 
 they might never have been married at all for all the 
 difference it made.
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 7 
 The growing coolness between Pramp and the 
 
 Mivians was brought to a head by the refusal of the 
 Council of Authority to pass his application for a room 
 at the Caravanserai the following summer. Broadbent, 
 the secretary, told him that no rooms were vacant. The 
 next day Perry, a pillar of the administration, who 
 achieved the appearance of intelligence inside the 
 Civil Service and the reality of dullness outside it, 
 informed Pramp that he had just booked a room for 
 himself and two friends. Pramp confronted Broad- 
 bent with this information, and was told that he, 
 Broadbent, had been instructed by the Council to 
 convey to Pramp, should he apply, the information 
 that there was no room. 
 
 " But why, if there is room ? " said Pramp. 
 
 " I am not at liberty to say. I can only tell you that 
 the Council carefully considered your case before 
 arriving at their decision." 
 
 Unable to get anything satisfactory out of Broadbent, 
 Pramp decided to write to Miss Parkin, whose practical 
 experience as Manager of the School gave her such 
 influence over the Council of Authority, that it was 
 reputed to respond to any and every recommendation 
 whether dictated by common sense or personal anti- 
 pathy that emanated from her, like the wag of a tail on 
 a dog. Pramp felt sure that in Miss Parkin lay the 
 source of the objection. 
 
 But committees are the best device yet invented for 
 bearing responsibility, simply because of the impossi- 
 bility of bringing it home to any member of them, and 
 Pramp had to tread warily. As a first step, then, he 
 wrote to Miss Parkin. Beginning with a statement 
 that he was sensible of the disapprobation with which
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 she had viewed him during the last six months, he asked 
 in blunt terms the reason. Then with a backward 
 glance of censure at slanders which are disseminated in 
 secret, but fear to come into the open to risk refutation 
 by their victim, he demanded in the light of the com- 
 mittee's refusal to admit him to the Caravanserai, the 
 opportunity of appearing before the Council and 
 defending himself against whatever accusations might 
 be brought. 
 
 To his surprise the Council gave their consent. 
 Whether the consent was due to the strong attachment 
 to Democracy nourished by theJMivians, an attachment 
 which abhors the secret decisions of the bureaucrat and 
 will have all its doings exhibited for inspection by the 
 popular eye, or to the pleasure anticipated by the 
 Council at seeing a black sheep subjected to the high- 
 minded inquisition of the pure, delivered up at his 
 own request, as it were, for vivisection under the 
 sacred knife of morality, is conjectural. Pramp also 
 anticipated amusement, though of a different kind. 
 Knowing his case to be irretrievably blackened by Miss 
 Parkin in advance, he trusted to the activity of his 
 tongue to procure him compensation for the loss of his 
 reputation. 
 
 The Council was arranged round three sides of a long 
 table, of which Miss Parkin occupied one in isolated 
 state. Old Dowson was there and Trout, the vege- 
 tarian doctor ; the rest were all more or less personally 
 known to Pramp. Tanner, the Quaker, had once 
 walked about arm-in-arm with him, and Miss Harrison 
 who wrote Mivian text-books, read some English 
 literature and taught more, had in conversation with 
 Pramp professed great sympathy with what the world 
 in its narrow-mindedness called immorality. 
 
 '59
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Pramp was motioned to a seat at the unoccupied end 
 of the table opposite Miss Parkin. 
 
 Speaking calmly and temperately, he stated that he 
 had been refused admittance to the Caravanserai, and 
 considered it only just that he should be informed of 
 the reason. 
 
 " It is a painful subject, Mr. Pramp," said Miss Par- 
 kin, " and I had hoped to avoid a discussion of it ; but 
 since you insist I must tell you that your conduct with 
 a certain lady last time you visited the Caravanserai 
 was, to say the least of it, indiscreet." 
 
 " In what way ? " 
 
 " You must know as well as I do, Mr. Pramp, and 
 you cannot insist that I should go into details." 
 
 " But I do insist, since I cannot conceive what you 
 refer to." 
 
 " Well then," said Miss Parkin, not blushing but 
 lowering her eyes with an appearance of what might 
 retrospectively by some twenty years have been called 
 demureness, " we have reason to believe that you 
 carried your relations with this young lady beyond the 
 bounds of the most liberal interpretation of the word 
 propriety." 
 
 " You mean I indulged in sexual intercourse with her, 
 I suppose ? " said Pramp. " There is not the slightest 
 need for you all to look shocked at hearing stated in 
 public a circumstance which you have been communi- 
 cating privately to one another, and from which com- 
 munication you have individually derived the greatest 
 satisfaction. Has a council as such a greater delicacy 
 than the sum of all the delicacies of each of the mem- 
 bers who compose it ? I think not. So you may spare 
 yourselves the necessity of manufacturing blushes, 
 especially as I am going to deny the charge absolutely. 
 
 160
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 Before doing so, however, I should like to ask whether 
 it is not one of the chief marks of intellectual superiority 
 which distinguishes the Caravanserai from similar 
 holiday establishments in which young men and women 
 are brought together I refer to boarding-houses, 
 church outings and teachers" conferences that certain 
 dogmas which we all repudiate in our debating societies 
 as antiquated and conventional are here flouted in 
 practice, and the fundamental right of both sexes to go 
 separately or together to the devil in their own way is 
 insisted upon ? " 
 
 " I think, Mr. Pramp," said Doctor Trout, " that you 
 entirely mistake the principles underlying the institu- 
 tion of the Caravanserai, and the object with which that 
 institution was formed. The object of the Caravan- 
 serai is to bring together Socialists of both sexes and 
 every school of thought, for the purposes of mutual 
 instruction and interchange of views, and at the same 
 time to give them a good holiday." 
 
 " It is absolute nonsense to talk as Mr. Pramp does of 
 what is allowed at the Caravanserai," said Miss Parkin. 
 " Besides the circumstance of what he means being 
 wrong in itself, the effects of such conduct as his upon 
 the young girls who come there must be considered. 
 Many of the girls who come at present would not be 
 allowed to come if the place got a bad name. Just 
 let him try it on and see, that is what I say." 
 
 " It is presumably because I have tried it on that I 
 am here now," rejoined Pramp, " though what ' it ' 
 precisely is I can't say. No man can foresee his past, 
 and I had not the slightest idea at the time that mine 
 would appear like this in retrospect, nor indeed have 
 I any idea as yet what its appearance is. But, assum- 
 ing my conduct to be everything you suggest, why do 
 
 161 L
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 you so rigorously censure in me what you condone 
 in others ? ' 
 
 " I am sure there have been no other instances of 
 this sort of thing that have come to my knowledge," 
 said Miss Parkin, " or if there have in the past, the 
 persons concerned have been refused admittance to the 
 Caravanserai afterwards." 
 
 " But the Caravanserai has always been a byword for 
 flirtations. People have been known to make love 
 there who have never got anyone to look at them any- 
 where else. Schoolmistresses have got mated there by 
 the score, and people have been known to become con- 
 verted to socialism simply to obtain the privilege of 
 going there and placing themselves upon a favourable 
 market, a notable instance of the influence of our 
 desires in moulding our intellectual creeds, as you at 
 least will admit, Mr. Dowson." 
 
 " There have been many cases of marriages but few 
 of impropriety, which is a very different thing," said 
 Mr. Dowson. " In fact, for a considerable period, Mr. 
 Pramp, we have had to deal with no conduct even 
 remotely akin to yours. We felt bound to take action in 
 your case in order to prevent the recurrence of practices 
 of which, you must see, we could not do other than 
 disapprove." 
 
 " Oh, I see ! There was a difference in my case. 
 You felt bound to drop on me as constituting a peculiar 
 case because I had departed from precedent by marrying 
 the lady afterwards, a serious lapse into morality, I grant 
 you, and possibly worthy of censure according to the 
 views which I have sometimes heard expressed by mem- 
 bers of this committee. ' Why ask for unhappiness by 
 forming a permanent contract on a fleeting passion ? ' 
 Is that not yours, Dr. Trout. ' We cannot predict our 
 
 162
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 feelings ten years hence ; why make arrangements on 
 the supposition that we can f ' have I not heard you 
 in one of your daringly original moods appropriate 
 remarks of Mr. Shaw on these lines, Miss Harrison ? 
 But surely if you really are making the mistake of 
 living up to your opinions and censuring me for being 
 ass enough to marry, you have brought the accusation 
 under the wrong head." 
 
 " If you insist on treating the matter flippantly, Mr. 
 Pramp, it is impossible for me to do anything further. 
 It is a painful matter for us, as I have said before, and 
 it was only at your earnest request that we consented 
 to go into it again at all." 
 
 " I don't see that it's half so painful for you as it is for 
 me," said Pramp. " I get my character blackened and 
 am deprived for evermore of the inestimable delights 
 of the Caravanserai. You find a convenient method of 
 getting rid of people you dislike personally, which 
 brings you an added reputation for morality, and 
 encircles your benevolent heads with a halo for zeal in 
 rooting out unpleasant scandals into the bargain. As 
 for treating the matter flippantly, can you conceive a 
 more flippant method of explaining to a man a charge 
 against him than to keep him talking for twenty minutes 
 without producing a shred of the evidence on which you 
 presumably base your charge ? " 
 
 " The evidence was provided, sir, by your own 
 statements ; you talked of the matter openly," said 
 Miss Parkin. 
 
 " I know of no such statements." 
 
 " But the matter was common knowledge. Every 
 one was talking about you and you took no steps to stop 
 it." 
 
 " I take steps ! How could I when it was all done 
 
 163
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 behind my back ? Surely it was for you to take steps. 
 Here was the Caravanserai, according to your own 
 account, teeming with a scandal of the gravest des- 
 cription ; it was common knowledge to all the young 
 ladies whom it is your duty, so you say, to shield from 
 the faintest breath of impropriety, and yet you took no 
 steps at the time to put a stop to it, either by finding 
 out whether it was true and sending me away on the 
 spot if it was, or by convincing yourselves that it was 
 untrue, and publicly exposing the slander. By so doing 
 you would have removed the slur cast upon an innocent 
 lady's reputation, not to speak of the beneficial effects 
 of such a course upon the fictitious young debutantes of 
 your fond imagination, who would then have remained 
 undisturbed in their belief that the world is a parsley bed. 
 Instead of doing these things you deliberately fostered 
 the scandal, smacked your lips over it in private, bowed 
 and scraped to me when you met me in public as though 
 you cherished an enormous affection for me, and right 
 up to the present time have taken no steps to find out 
 whether it has any foundation in fact or not." 
 
 " Do you mean to imply that it isn't true ? " said 
 Doctor Trout. 
 
 " What isn't ? I have yet to find out what ' it ' is." 
 
 " Why, if you will have it in plain words, that you 
 visited, the lady's room at night." 
 
 " Entirely and absolutely untrue." 
 
 " But you are reported to have volunteered the 
 information yourself to a member of the committee." 
 
 Pramp looked at Tanner, who looked deprecatingly 
 at Pramp as if he objected to being mixed up in so shady 
 an affair at all. 
 
 " And do you mean to say that you have brought the 
 accusation entirely on the second-hand and unsubstan- 
 
 164
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 tiated evidence of one person ? You have spent the 
 whole period of our memorable acquaintanceship, 
 Miss Parkin, in spreading a report as to my complete 
 untrustworthiness. Yet you are apparently accepting 
 every word of mine, passed on to you at second-hand as 
 gospel. You really should live down to your opinions 
 of other people's characters." 
 
 " Well, you know, Pramp, that I warned you over 
 and over again about going too far with Miss Trail, as 
 she was then. But you would go on." 
 
 " You warned me because I made no secret of the 
 fact that I kissed her. The fact that you warned me 
 against going too far does not necessarily mean that I 
 did. The license taken by the imagination of very 
 rigid people such as yourself seems to be in the exact pro- 
 portion to the prudery of their lives. What evidence 
 have you for more than a kiss ? " 
 
 " I can only repeat, Mr. Pramp, that we took action 
 on your own statement." 
 
 " Which from your knowledge of my character you 
 saw every reason to distrust and made no attempt to 
 substantiate." 
 
 " It was not this specific case alone that influenced 
 our decision," continued Miss Parkin ; " your general 
 behaviour at the Caravanserai and the looseness of your 
 attitude with regard to matters in which a certain dis- 
 cretion is essential do not make you a very desirable 
 addition to a mixed company. You broke rules and 
 encouraged others to break them, kept us all waiting up 
 by coming in late at night, and did a number of things 
 which, though not serious in themselves, were irritating 
 to the people who were responsible for the management 
 of the place. You insisted on smoking in the drawing- 
 room, getting into the house through the ground-floor
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 windows at night, and on one occasion broke one of the 
 upstairs windows by throwing pebbles at it, in trying to 
 persuade the lady whose bedroom it was to come out. 
 Your language was often profane, and as I have said, 
 your general attitude to the young girls and even the 
 servants of the Caravanserai was often most offensive. 
 You were trying continually to throw ridicule on insti- 
 tutions like marriage and religion, and seemed to find 
 decency in women as odious as hypocrisy." 
 
 " Perhaps, Miss Parkin, that is because decency is 
 their greatest hypocrisy." 
 
 Mr. Dowson, during the previous dialogue, had 
 restrained himself with great difficulty. He looked 
 furiously angry and had tried several times to break in. 
 You could hear his mind working with indignation like 
 a cow chewing grass. 
 
 " If you think, Mr. Pramp," he said, " that remarks 
 of that kind are going to help your case, you make a 
 great mistake. It is impossible for us at present to re- 
 consider our decision, and Miss Parkin has already given 
 you what are, to my mind, very adequate reasons for it." 
 (" Hear hear ! " from the committee.) " If you show by 
 your conduct in the society during the coming year that 
 you desire to be readmitted to the Caravanserai next 
 summer, we may be prepared to reconsider the question 
 then." 
 
 " That will be mighty good of you. Thank you for 
 your condescension in advance," said Pramp, " but I'll 
 be damned if I ever visit your beastly boarding-school 
 again ! " 
 
 He left them in dudgeon, and the society knew 
 him no more. But to cease to be a Mivian had 
 ceased to be a cause for regret for the society, divided 
 over the war, lost influence and caste. 
 
 166
 
 TINKERING WITH SOCIALISM 
 
 All that was vivid and vital left it and sought an outlet 
 elsewhere. It became like the Church, a husk without 
 a kernel, a mausoleum of dead reputations. 
 
 Even when the approach of Conscription rent the 
 air with controversy the united voice of the Mivians 
 was heard uplifted neither on the one side nor on the 
 other. And when the fateful day itself arrived, when 
 Radicals abjured their watchwords and forgot even to 
 talk about the liberty of the individual, when the 
 Church deleted the sixth Commandment and expur- 
 gated the fifth chapter of St. Matthew, when the 
 Nonconformists held up their hands in horror but 
 made no other use of them at the persecution of 
 the conscientious, when the Daily News almost took a 
 definite line, and the Army was supreme in the land 
 on that day the Mivians were just not heard of at all. 
 
 167
 
 Chapter 5 : Real Sentiment ! 
 
 ,";/;?":"" i 
 
 IT is a queer fact that no one has noticed the New 
 Forest. We prate of the beauties of Cornwall ; 
 we sometimes visit Devonshire. The Cotswolds are 
 known to every Oxford undergraduate, and form the 
 subject of his earlier poems. The motor-car has called 
 our attention to Surrey, and the Metropolitan has 
 discovered the existence of Beechy Bucks. It has 
 been generally believed that Sussex is the exclusive 
 property of Mr. Hilaire Belloc, but that has not pre- 
 vented us from visiting it and discovering that it is still 
 beautiful despite its literary ownership. We have been 
 to the Isle of Wight in sufficient numbers to remove the 
 impression that it is a garden, while every one who has 
 read Baddeley has been to the Lakes, and even some 
 of those who have only read Wordsworth. Even the 
 Continent has not escaped the more adventurous. Roy- 
 alty's visits to Paris created a scandal and produced the 
 Entente Cordiale, since when Paris has become popular. 
 Except, however, for a very dull book entitled The 
 Children of the New Forest, written early in the last 
 century and full of bandits and religion, nobody seems 
 to have noticed the place. The widest stretches of 
 an imagination which motor-cars have stimulated to 
 destroy distance cannot call it suburban, while the call 
 of Bournemouth, the Paradise of the City man, with its 
 " nice " people and winter gardens, on the further side, 
 is too insistent to allow us to dally in the Forest. 
 
 1 68
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 This regrettable state of affairs continued until a 
 certain Mr. Caine procured a wife and a donkey cart, 
 drove them through the Forest early one spring, and 
 proceeded to write a book describing his adventures. 
 
 During the course of his tour Mr. Caine discovered 
 a boarding-cottage at Brook, containing a Miss Ellen and 
 a Miss Jessie ; in the course of his book he immortalized 
 them. 
 
 Thus it happened that Pramp during his last year at 
 Oxford, being in need of a quiet place and good cooking 
 in order that the final spurt of reading before Greats 
 should be as little unpleasant as possible, read Mr. 
 Caine's book and in consequence went, in the company 
 of five other men, to the boarding-cottage at Brook. 
 
 Here he had been happy ; here he had known ro- 
 mance ; here for the last time he had been really different 
 from other men ; here for the last time the flowing 
 river of idealism had flowed clear and bright ; that river 
 so soon to trickle away into the reedy sands of acquies- 
 cence, when Pramp on 300 a year would subside into 
 a villa, to till his allotment and quarrel with his wife. 
 Pramp then, and we hope it will not make the reader 
 annoyed with him, was sentimental about Brook ; and 
 after being expelled by the Mivians he wished to intro- 
 duce Daisy to this place where he had been happy. 
 Having married her, it seems only right and fitting that 
 he should take her away from the facile cleverness of the 
 Mivians to the simple life of Miss Ellen and Miss Jessie 
 with their talk of dogs, brocades and puddings as a relief 
 from the chatter about poor laws, servile states and 
 statistics. He hoped with his love to recapture youth 
 and revive the ashes of undergraduate sentimentality. 
 
 The unexpected happiness of connubiality, the odd- 
 ness of finding legality, respectability and convention 
 
 169
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 allied for once with pleasure, and pointing unhesitatingly 
 along the same road, the joy of meeting Miss Ellen at 
 the station decked out in a brand new scarf in honour 
 of the occasion, and of driving six miles through the 
 woods to Brook on a glorious autumn day, in the identi- 
 cal donkey cart used by the historic Mr. Caine and his 
 wife all these things filled Pramp with such happiness 
 that by the time he arrived at Brook, Mivians and the 
 war had passed alike into the limbo of bad dreams 
 which are forgotten in the morning. 
 
 After a considerable luncheon Pramp thought to 
 banish the last relics of Mivianism by calling on the 
 rector, an old friend. Daisy stayed behind. Parsons 
 always provoked her to hostility ; she was not yet suffi- 
 ciently emancipated from religion to be amused by it. 
 
 He was a jolly old man, rectoral, fond of cricket, his 
 garden and the parish children. He still read his clas- 
 sics, which he carried about with him in pocket editions 
 on journeys, his preference being for Lucretius and 
 Thucydides, writers admirably adapted to encourage 
 the natural human pagan to peep through the veneer 
 of parson. 
 
 Perhaps in peace time or at Oxford Pramp would not 
 have been interested in him ; but in certain moods he 
 felt that he would, even in those days. But now all his 
 prattle of his garden and the young beetroots that he 
 was going to try with Sunday's cold meat, of the new 
 Belgian method of planting celery and seakale, and then 
 his narration of the summer glories of his garden and his 
 wife's improvements of these in a somewhat censori- 
 ous and disparaging tone and the very sight of the 
 lingering flowers in his beds, a withered stalk of holly- 
 hock gemmed with a few shrivelling blooms, a late rose, 
 the red stone-crop in the borders, and the choir of gnats 
 
 170
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 droning up and down in a golden, dusty dance above 
 the holly hedge all this seen in direct contrast to tubes 
 and buses, business letters and over-driven waitresses, 
 pointed intensely for Pramp the contrast between the 
 new life and the old. 
 
 Reader. What is all this talk about Pramp's feelings ? 
 So far you have been merciful and spared us Psychology. 
 But all this stuff about beetroots, seen in contrast to 
 tubes, really, really. . . . 
 
 Author. They are almost the first creditable feelings 
 he has had. Don't be hard on them. Besides, I am 
 just going to explain why they are brought in. 
 
 Much of Pramp's future conduct may be attributed 
 in part to the most trifling circumstances of this par- 
 ticular afternoon. It is one of the ends of life to make 
 all our actions matter, to make everything significant, 
 and this afternoon everything did matter. 
 
 Reader. This is worse than ever. If the choice is 
 between these aphorisms about the ends of life and 
 Pramp's feelings, for goodness' sake let me have some 
 more feelings. 
 
 Author. You are just going to. 
 
 He was led up to wash before tea into a spare room 
 whither he had never before penetrated, full of half- 
 forgotten things, old photographs of children, pictures 
 that had once been in the nursery, and a venerable rock- 
 ing-horse, into the entrails of which two generations of 
 children had stuffed through a hole once occupied by 
 the tail undesired crusts, and other rejected odds and 
 ends of food, with disastrous osmic effects. Miniatures 
 of grand relations they had good miniatures there 
 lay on a brocaded settle at the end of the bed. On a 
 shelf was a collection of prayer-books and bibles, mile- 
 stones these in the children's religious life which you 
 
 171
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 might set up in their chronological order of reception, 
 from indications afforded by their general bulk, size of 
 print, and austerity of fly-leaf dedication. 
 
 But among all these things that spoke of children in- 
 deed, but of children vanished and grown up, there lay 
 on the brocaded settle, side by side with the miniatures, 
 a heap of other childish possessions, as full of present 
 youthful life as the others were of dying memories 
 on top of all a white silk dancing frock, " honey- 
 combed " on the breast and wrists, and a pair of dancing 
 slippers that a child of seven or eight might have worn. 
 
 Reader. This is really too bad. You are only writ- 
 ing this sentimental stuff to show that you can do it 
 when you really try. I believe you, but as you do it 
 rather badly, why go on trying ? 
 
 Author. Be quiet. This is my sentimental chapter. 
 If you don't like it, go on to the next. Meanwhile don't 
 interrupt. 
 
 Pramp took up the left slipper she had danced in it 
 perhaps already once or twice it was as light as a feather 
 and fastened with elastic round the ankle and over the 
 instep, like the ones that Whistler's grey and green girl 
 wore in the speckled picture. It was in such slippers 
 as these that she would have stood to the artist, hanging 
 her summer hat in her hand and pouting at the free 
 butterflies above her head, if he and she had lived to- 
 day. The one before him differed little from hers, save 
 for the higher, gracefully-curving heel, and perhaps a 
 slenderer toe, for she was dressed with modern dainti- 
 ness, this little " danseuse " whom he had never seen 
 and about whom he wondered if she really lived. 
 
 Why were her things lying out like this on the old 
 settle ? Might the door open soon and she run in her- 
 self, glad to put them on again and dance, or the nurse, 
 
 172
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 that living embodiment of authority, enter and gravely 
 lay them in the wardrobe that stood in the corner there ? 
 He remembered though that there were no children in 
 the house, and there was no party surely that night. 
 And so it was quick, shifting dreams of his own that he 
 fitted to them, dreams of dancing lessons in the big 
 drawing-room where all the parish children came, or 
 better still of Christmas or birthday parties, when the 
 carriages rolled up the drive in the foggy, early hours of 
 December evenings. He saw the childish foot peep 
 from the dark old cab, feel its way out of the rugs, and 
 poise itself to take her weight as she touched the step ; 
 or perhaps she walked to the party, her shoes in her bag, 
 or in an elder brother's deep pockets, not to be put on 
 till her strong boots were off and herself dry and warm 
 in the house. 
 
 But in the end it was with a dream peculiarly personal 
 that he left the room and went again downstairs, a 
 dream of a birthday party, with her as the guest in the 
 autumn he loved so well. Tea on the lawn under a 
 mellow south wall, the cake wreathed in reddening 
 creepers, hide-and-seek in the darkening corners of the 
 garden, where her feet sent the gravel flying and her 
 white dress betrayed her under the laurel hedge ; and 
 last, the farewells waved from the porch, her face 
 flushed as she spoke good-bye, flushed with excitement 
 and the western radiance ; the drive back in the gover- 
 ness cart, her mother welcoming her at the gate, saying 
 that she must really go to bed at once, and brushing 
 from her hair a few dead laurel leaves. 
 
 ^ ^ 2 . '-',' 
 
 A few days later they were joined by Strachan. 
 Strachan had been a close friend of Pramp's at Oxford. 
 
 173
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Their friendship was intensified to a large extent by 
 that sentimentalism which the atmosphere of Oxford 
 seems peculiarly to engender, and which so often arises, 
 as one of the Greek epigrammatists notes, between young 
 men who embark together on the study of Philosophy. 
 
 Strachan was subject to sick headaches, and had spent 
 some fifty pounds on oculists who unanimously attri- 
 buted these to his eyes, and insisted on his wearing on 
 certain occasions no less than three pairs of spectacles at 
 once, until a rising young doctor operated on him for 
 appendicitis on the ground that the root of the trouble 
 was stomachic. The only result of this was slightly to 
 intensify the headaches owing to the confinement and 
 lack of exercise necessitated by a long convalescence, 
 and Strachan began to regard his headaches as incurable 
 until, to his surprise, he found them beginning to 
 diminish as a result of a total cessation of work which 
 occurred during a fit of despondency. It then appeared 
 that if he wanted to forego headaches he must in a large 
 measure forego work as well, and as he was an ambitious 
 young man with an overpowering desire to get a First 
 in schools, the Third which he eventually obtained had 
 a prematurely souring effect upon a temperament which 
 was otherwise agreeable enough. 
 
 Two avenues of employment are open to young men 
 with a classical education and nothing particular in the 
 way of money or influence who secure Thirds at Oxford, 
 the Church and the School. A Third qualifies one 
 either to give instruction to adults about God or to 
 children about Greek Grammar, the salary being com- 
 mensurate in a reverse degree with the importance of 
 the duties undertaken. As Philosophy had had its 
 usual effect of making Strachan into an agnostic, he 
 arrived by the process of elimination at schoolmastering,
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 and now found himself holding the post of a lower-form 
 Classical master at a salary of .150 a year in a third-rate 
 public school. 
 
 A year's experience of this work had brought him 
 largely into agreement with Shaw's doctrine that " he 
 who can does, he who cannot teaches," " doing " for him 
 being more or less equivalent to writing. He was burn- 
 ing with literary ardour, but cursed with a want of 
 energy that made his output fall lamentably short of his 
 aspiration. 
 
 His attitude at Brook was accordingly one of violent 
 discontent with the present, mixed with sentimental 
 reminiscences of the golden past. 
 
 He had had a particularly trying time at school for a 
 would-be literary artist, correcting immature essays by 
 fifteen- year-old boys on the position of the stage in the 
 Greek Theatre, the Causes of the Peloponnesian war, 
 the character of Tiberius and other threadbare subjects, 
 with regard to which it would be difficult to say whether 
 teachers or pupils were more indifferent. Most irritat- 
 ing of all was the routine of school life with its strict 
 confinement of the intelligence to channels so well worn 
 that its exercise became almost mechanical, inimical 
 alike to creative and critical work. 
 
 It is doubtful whether the creative spring ever 
 bubbled strongly within him, but the flying scud of 
 Greek Grammar papers, Latin Elegiacs and speeches to 
 be turned into oratio obliqua seemed quite effectually to 
 have choked whatever powers he once possessed. 
 
 " I feel flat, expressionless, tongue-tied," he said to 
 Pramp. " There is not an idea in my brain, I fancy, 
 lively enough to wriggle down my pen into expression. 
 I seem for weeks and weeks and weeks to have been 
 thinking nothing. If an idea strikes me I am never 
 
 175
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 able to develop it, and afterwards I cannot recapture 
 the train of thought from which it flashed. Yet I am 
 so dipped in essayist literature that I try to turn every- 
 thing to literary account. You remember Samuel 
 Butler's description of the mature Ernest in the Way of 
 All Flesh ? Ernest always carried a note-book in which 
 to jot down tags of thought and scraps of observations, 
 which might form the nucleus of essays. I too spend 
 most of my time in the painful analysis of people who 
 catch my attention, just as when I am out walking I 
 wrestle with the landscape, trying to fit words to it. I 
 often think I am a fool for my pains, labouring to be an 
 artist ; and yet from time to time a little encourage- 
 ment comes." 
 
 " Surely," said Pramp, " you had encouragement 
 enough over your John Angel sketch ? Everybody at 
 Oxford was extraordinarily struck with it, only you were 
 a fool to write it on a theme which made it unprintable 
 by some 240 years. It would have gone down very well 
 as a play by Wycherley, for a Restoration audience, 
 but for practical use to-day it was a sterile tour de force" 
 
 " Yes, that sketch was good. But I couldn't do it 
 now. My style even has gone, and I know the reason 
 essay after essay, week after week, to be corrected and 
 scratched into grammar, not style ! " 
 
 " Can't you persuade your father to let you give up 
 teaching, and afford you a bare competence to live on 
 for the next two or three years ? " 
 
 " My father ! You know it is from him ironically 
 enough that I inherit my spark of restlessness, my seem- 
 ingly paralyzed mental tentacles. He, of course, is 
 worldly wise after the manner of fathers all the world 
 over, who give their sons good advice, not being able any 
 longer to give them bad examples. He bids me work and 
 
 176
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 save, i.e. teach and save ; * Work your way in,' he writes, 
 and again ' You can't make your living by literature 
 all at once.' It is all meant for my good, of course, yet 
 every word he says increases my determination to fling 
 off the threads of teaching, which Time, King of the 
 Lilliput minutes, binds faster and faster till Gulliver is 
 inextricable (you laugh I sneer myself at my own 
 swelling images, my bombast !), and at last cuts himself 
 free only to go into the world a naked man, to make its 
 acquaintance and struggle with it in hatred, irony, 
 humour, in any mood from ink to champagne. 
 
 " But you must be bored with my literary whinings. 
 I meant to sit and gossip cheerfully with you till the 
 early hours in the Oxford way. And yet it's difficult 
 for me to recapture the old atmosphere. We seem 
 somehow to have drifted so far away these last years, ever 
 since I started teaching. The gap one leaves at Oxford 
 by one's departure, which one flatters oneself at the time 
 will be so tremendous, fills very quickly, I know." 
 
 " Yes, I admit," said Pramp, " that I had every 
 temptation to forget you the following term, what with 
 the Union, being Editor of the Tarsity, Schools and 
 so on ; but there were letters, and yours were always 
 unique." 
 
 " Yes, but yours meant more to me than mine to you. 
 The gentle, half- curious kindliness, the sudden touches 
 of personality that grow evasive when friends are parted 
 and are recalled by a familiar phrasing or even a mere 
 statement in a letter, just as you remember a curl or a 
 gesture from a photograph all these were brought back 
 by your letters, which I used to read and re-read simply 
 for the pleasure of the moods they brought." 
 
 " Ah, there you have your subject ! Every phase of 
 the mood of the brooder over old letters demands an 
 
 177 M
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 essay in the mixed Lamb Stevenson style. There is a 
 chance for your literary gift if, indeed, you have one." 
 
 " I'll try it some day, given the energy," said Strachan. 
 " But I used to venture these things with considerably 
 more address two or three years ago. You remember 
 our first term at Oxford you thought me something of 
 a light in the literary world ? " 
 
 " It's awfully dim to me now how and when we first 
 met. There was such a rush of fresh acquaintances that 
 first term, and it was only later that certain figures 
 yourself, for instance began to disentangle themselves 
 from the general ruck." 
 
 " Oh, I remember lots of it ; this was the very first 
 time of our meeting. (Scene : scholars' table at dinner.) 
 J. H. Strachan. l Were you the man who played scrum 
 half to me this afternoon ? ' 
 
 " A. R. Pramp. l No ! ' and a long silence in which, I 
 think, I liked your face. That was all we said to each 
 other that first time. I'm not sure that I asked you to 
 my rooms after Hall that night. Then a little later one 
 night you did come in, and prowled about my books, 
 and we sat in front of a roaring fire I could smoke a 
 pipe without qualms by then and there was always a 
 4-02. tin of ' King's Weed ' on my mantelpiece (you 
 must remember the first time you were persuaded and 
 were sick) and I read you Old China and you were 
 entranced, and Rabbi-ben Ezra, and you were filled with 
 a passion to explore Browning. And then you espied 
 an official envelope addressed to J. H. Strachan, B.A., 
 and you laughed and said : * Some one's playing a j oke on 
 you,' and then I laughed, explaining about my Colonial 
 degree, and you were silent, thinking me very, very 
 clever ; and you read an essay of mine written when I was 
 hesitating between taking Honour Mods and Greats, or
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 Greats alone, and said, ' I say, you can write English ! * 
 and I was pleased and proud. 
 
 "And we took in the Oxford Charivari every week, 
 and really thought it all good except the drawings. I 
 started buying it, I think ; but once you came to my aid 
 with a penny, and thenceforward it was in common, our 
 first common property. And you encouraged me to 
 write the criticism of the ' Girl in the Train ' which we 
 saw together for it, and the cheque for a guinea came 
 and I took it up to your room and you were out, and I 
 had to tell you on the way to ' Hall ' ; and we both 
 thought somehow that my future was made in litera- 
 ture ; and we also thought the guinea was not to be 
 hoarded, so we went out to spend it, and the old rogue 
 in the High tried to swindle us in vain over the Hogarths, 
 which you bought eventually in the Broad. And when 
 I wasn't ' blooding ' it with the second-year men at 
 Cuthbert Montague's lunches, your scout what was 
 his name ? Golders, used to bring your lunch down in- 
 to my rooms ; and in the evening we used to have cocoa 
 with Bates, who liked Calverley ; and you and I enter- 
 tained him and Thomas and Mint in my room one even- 
 ing, and Mint talked far too much about his relations 
 in Canada although you'd hardly have said so with- 
 out me, for you didn't dare to form definite opinions of 
 people in those days and the lingering public school 
 spirit in me thought it was a good thing you rowed in 
 the Morrison fours. Then in the ' vac.' we each found 
 that the other was an appropriate person to write to, 
 and I came to London because of my eyes and we both 
 came up to Oxford by the 1.45 from Paddington and 
 drove together to the side lodge, and you thought half- 
 a-crown was enough for the cab, and I wanted to give 
 three shillings. And you had brought all Hogarth back 
 
 179
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 with you, a complete set of prints (it was that term, I 
 think) ; I tried to show you that you were wasting 
 your time writing verses, and you chewed your pencil to 
 shreds and ' weren't at all sure.' 
 
 " Wasn't it before that I don't know, though that 
 we went to c Peter Pan ' and the * Blue Bird ' together, 
 when that blessed foreigner tried to squeeze into the 
 front of the queue, when the Haymarket doors were 
 opened, and was gently pulled out by a bobby ? 
 
 " Then summer, and those jolly library editions of 
 Meredith we read in a punt you and I, you and I 
 Good God, I didn't think I remembered it all like that." 
 
 " It all comes back to me too, as Slightly says. Once 
 set a spark to the train of memory and reminiscences 
 explode all over you. Now I understand how it is 
 autobiographical novels get written. But you never 
 came to France with us, did you ? I forget why." 
 
 " No ! And in the autumn you had moved your 
 rooms and were not so convenient for tea ; but before 
 I went to the sanatorium for my eyes I gave you ' Vir- 
 ginibus Puerisque,' and put my first Oxford light verse 
 therein on the title-page ; I was pleased about that for 
 it was the first thing I wrote for you that I thought 
 good enough for you to see ; my ' Agnostic's Feelings in 
 Balliol College Chapel ' had been burnt at once unseen." 
 
 " Well, I think it is time to turn in," said Pramp. 
 
 " Not quite, for my gossip is not yet done ; we've 
 reached the point when in chairs drawn up to the fire 
 we may gradually fall into silence, a little sleepy eyed, 
 and sit gazing into the coals, talking perhaps in drowsy 
 snatches like children, musing and dreaming, but, please 
 God, not thinking." 
 
 3 
 For a week Strachan stayed in the New Forest. He 
 
 1 80
 
 REAL SENTIMENT! 
 
 talked perpetually of writing, but produced only one 
 essay in the Hazlitt vein on "The Two Walkers," 
 contrasting Pramp, the vigorous man, who was forever 
 wishing to open up new country and pound through the 
 old at four miles an hour to get to it, with himself, who 
 would dally in the well-known spots and not go farther 
 afield than the next village, knowing his surroundings so 
 well, however, as to name every glade in the wood. 
 
 The rejection of the essay by the Saturday Westmin- 
 ster so discouraged Strachan that, despite Pramp's solici- 
 tude for his welfare, shown by administering to him 
 extracts from a small book by Andrew Dennett entitled 
 " How to do the Publisher," the burden of which was 
 " Never be disappointed at the return of a manuscript. 
 The taste of editors is capricious and bad. To try 
 again costs nothing but another stamp," that he could 
 not bring himself to pen anything else while in the 
 Forest, or to send " The Two Walkers " elsewhere. 
 
 In proportion, however, as his prospects in literature 
 darkened, his disgust with schoolmastering increased. 
 On leaving Brook, he threw up his job and applied for 
 a commission, having no enthusiasm for the war, but 
 finding in it, as did so many others, a refuge from the 
 contemplation of himself as a failure in life and the vision 
 of unattainable literary celebrity. 
 
 Within a month a bullet through his brain put an end 
 to a literary career which had begun unauspiciously, and 
 probably would have ended in the river. 
 
 Meanwhile, Pramp continued to enjoy the New 
 Forest. He was admirably adapted to life, in that his feel 
 ings were never so troubled by the loss even of a friend 
 but that he could see God's hand working for good in 
 all that happened, and could thus congratulate himself 
 on his perspicacious piety in the best Joblike manner. 
 
 181
 
 Chapter 6 : The Family and the Club 
 
 " TT is not to be thought of," said Mrs. Pramp. 
 
 A " What isn't ? " said her husband. 
 
 " Why, the idea of Arthur's joining this club of his. 
 A lot of professional cranks and agitators, that's what 
 they are ! I can't think what put such an idea into 
 his head." 
 
 " Well, my dear," said Mr. Pramp, secretly hoping 
 that his wife was not going to start one of her intermin- 
 able rows with Arthur, in which he would be bound to 
 take part on her side, of course for fear of another 
 row with himself, " I trust he won't do any such thing. 
 He's of age now and ought to be able to judge for 
 himself within limits ; but I can't believe that he 
 would go and behave so badly now after all the money 
 I've spent on his education." 
 
 Mr. Pramp held strongly that the object of educa- 
 tion was to teach the young to think like himself, the 
 measure of agreement achieved being in direct pro- 
 portion to the scale of the financial outlay. If, there- 
 fore, Arthur, who had really had a very expensive 
 education, entertained opinions which his father re- 
 garded with all the horror of which his phlegmatic 
 temperament was capable, it must be due to some 
 incurable perversity on the part of Arthur. 
 
 182
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 It should be mentioned that this attitude of Mr. 
 Pramp towards his son was modelled directly upon his 
 attitude towards his Creator, to which indeed it owed 
 its origin. In common with most other self-respecting 
 Englishmen, Mr. Pramp regarded religion as a sort of 
 business speculation in spiritual commodities, whereby 
 in return for regular attendance at church, abstention 
 from the grosser forms of vice, and judicious offerings 
 to the more deserving charities on his part, God was 
 bound by an implicit contract to lend him countenance 
 and support in all transactions upon which he himself, 
 or the nation of which he formed a humble but not 
 unworthy unit, was engaged. 
 
 God was a person of reliable patriotic sympathies, 
 who was bound to take the same view of the rights and 
 wrongs of the great national struggle as Mr. Pramp, 
 and it was only to be expected that views that were 
 good enough for God should be good enough for 
 Arthur. 
 
 Arthur, however, had behaved very queerly over this 
 war business. He didn't seem keen on it, somehow ; 
 too critical by half ! And Mr. Pramp could not help 
 feeling secretly glad that a hitherto undetected heart 
 weakness had caused the doctors to reject him for 
 military service. Otherwise, thought Mr. Pramp, he 
 might have developed opinions, always a nuisance at 
 any time, and particularly awkward just now. It 
 wouldn't do to start thinking about the war. And so 
 Mr. Pramp, always a kindly and genial old soul, who 
 cared, as a rule, far too much about domestic peace and 
 his food to have either the energy to oppose or the 
 understanding to sympathize with his son, forbore to 
 ask questions about the latter's opinions, hoping only 
 that he wouldn't do anything to annoy his mother. 
 
 83
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 The dread of annoying Ida had become second 
 nature with Augustus Pramp. His opinions, his 
 habits, even his appearance were modelled almost 
 entirely on the paramount necessity of keeping Ida in 
 a good temper. It would indeed have been difficult 
 to say that the views which we have just attributed to 
 him about education and the Deity were really held by 
 him and not those which he thought Ida would like 
 him to hold. It seemed, indeed, impossible to 
 exaggerate the extent to which he deferred to his wife. 
 That it could be exaggerated, that the old boy could 
 still break out, cut the leading strings that had bound 
 him for years and incidentally deliver himself with 
 force, originality and conviction, the upshot of this 
 club business was to show. Meanwhile, however, Mr. 
 Pramp only hoped that Arthur would not annoy his 
 mother. He remembered that Ida always made it so 
 decidedly uncomfortable for every one when she was 
 annoyed, and distributed her disfavours with a malici- 
 ous impartiality under which the innocent suffered 
 with the guilty. And she clearly was annoyed over 
 this club project of Arthur's. She had always dis- 
 approved of his friends, when he had been imprudent 
 enough to let her meet them, proclaiming that they 
 were not ladies and gentlemen ; or, what was worse, 
 discovering that they had been born such, but had 
 somehow lost that sense of decency, that feeling for the 
 fitness of things that alone enabled one to keep up the 
 necessary pretences. That Arthur should join a club 
 composed of these people young men with long hair 
 and young women with short hair, she had heard them 
 called was regarded by her as a definite challenge to 
 all that his mother's influence stood for. She was not 
 selfish enough to stand in Arthur's way when he 
 
 184
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 wanted what was for his own good, but when it came 
 to letting her down like that, it wanted all a mother's 
 love to protect him against himself. 
 
 " I am sure, Arthur dear," she said, " that you 
 wouldn't be so selfish as to grieve your mother, who 
 loves you, and only wants what is for your own good. 
 As if, with my experience of the world, I don't know 
 what consorting with this kind of person leads to." 
 
 " What kind of person ? " said Arthur innocently. 
 
 " You know as well as I do the kind of person I mean. 
 I hate these people with new-fangled ideas, who think 
 they know so much more than their parents did. All 
 these Socialists, you know, are out ' on the make.' 
 They have all got an axe to grind, and they take up 
 with these notions because they think they can get 
 something by them. And the women, from what I've 
 seen of them, are certainly not ladies." 
 
 " Well, nobody wants you to have anything to do 
 with them if you don't like them," grumbled Pramp, 
 " but I think I ought to be allowed to choose my own 
 friends." 
 
 " I should be the last person to interfere with your 
 choosing your friends," retorted Mrs. Pramp, " if only 
 you would be content to know normal people and 
 choose suitable friends from among them. As if there 
 weren't enough nice young people that we know, that 
 he must go out of his way to hobnob with every Tom, 
 Dick and Harry out of the gutter," she went on, 
 addressing her husband and relegating Pramp, despite 
 his presence, to the third person in her indignation. 
 
 " Well, my dear, now he knows you feel so strongly 
 about it, I hope he won't pursue this project of joining 
 the Ephemeral Club. We know it's a bit lonely for 
 him living in London by himself " both the Pramps
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 had been kept in ignorance of Arthur's marriage with 
 one of the cranky people, and pictured him celibate and 
 lonely in his London flat " but if he'd only take up 
 some of the introductions we've given him, he'd find 
 plenty of the right sort of people soon enough." 
 
 It was a standing grievance that Pramp, who had 
 gone to London with a sheaf of introductions to the 
 families of lawyers, clergymen and old University 
 friends of his father's, had studiously avoided them, 
 thereby causing heartbreakings at home and forfeiting 
 a by no means despicable chance of a legacy from an 
 aged and celibate priest. 
 
 But Mrs. Pramp was essentially too tragic a person 
 to admit of any solution that was not clear cut, or that 
 had about it the air of a compromise. Pramp would 
 either consort with the people she approved of, or the 
 family would know him no more. It was intimated 
 more particularly that his presence at the Christmas 
 festival, which the Pramp household were to celebrate 
 during the week, would in that event be superfluous. 
 
 Pramp had the usual dislike of interference by his 
 parents, but he found the allowance that his father 
 made him a useful addition to the pittance which was 
 deemed a sufficient reward for an embryo publisher, 
 and, besides, the cook's Christmas dinner and the drinks 
 attendant thereon were things not to be missed. So 
 he did not attempt further argument with his mother 
 at the moment, secretly determining to join the club 
 and say no more about it. 
 
 Mrs. Pramp was undeniably a tragic woman. She 
 passed her life metaphorically at the end of a diving- 
 board, ready at the slightest provocation to go in at the 
 deep end. It was her misfortune that nothing ever 
 happened in her life to justify any step even bordering 
 
 1 86
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 on the extreme. She plunged therefore into shallows, 
 and lived a life of anticlimax. Strangers laughed up 
 their sleeves. Her family, who were used to her, made 
 an art of artifice in playing up to her moods, and gave 
 her always the answers she expected. Her acquaint- 
 ance with truth, therefore, was of a nodding description. 
 Never having to face the actual, she unconsciously shut 
 her eyes to whatever would have displeased her had 
 they remained open. She did not so much bow to 
 the inevitable as cut it dead. Knowing that Pramp 
 would join the hated club when he returned to town, 
 she would not admit even to herself that she had the 
 knowledge. 
 
 2 
 
 Undoubtedly the Pramps had a first-rate home. Mr. 
 Pramp, who was a retired Indian Civil Servant, had 
 somehow escaped the Southsea boarding-house to 
 which it is usually left to complete the ruin of the liver 
 that India has begun, and had taken up his abode in a 
 converted farmhouse at Patching, in Surrey. It was 
 not exactly the best part of Surrey. The best part of 
 Surrey, as every one knows, has been cornered. Before 
 the coming of the motor-car and the financier's country 
 house, Surrey was perhaps as beautiful as any county in 
 England. The wooded hills, the heaths, streams and 
 meadows, the sudden contrasts of scenery, the infinite 
 variety of view, were all on so small a scale that every 
 type of English scenery, represented as it were in 
 miniature, could be viewed in the course of a day's 
 walk. In a mile one could pass from the rich pasture 
 and river scenery of midland England to barren, pine- 
 clad hills that seemed to have stepped straight out of 
 some Scotch landscape, and which in their turn give
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 place to rolling grassy downs which you would think 
 to find in Sussex. 
 
 London, of course, and the spread of the southern 
 suburbs effaced, after a time, all Surrey north of Sutton. 
 But the further parts were left inviolate for many years 
 by the unparagoned brutality of the railway services. 
 
 Then came the motor-cars and in their wake the 
 motoring hotels and golf courses. The big estates 
 were taken over by rich city merchants and Americans, 
 who curtailed rights of way and closed footpaths, for 
 the passion of the newly made rich man to exhibit his 
 possessions to admiring friends is only equalled by his 
 fear that they should be overlooked by the excluded. 
 
 Surrey has rapidly become a rich man's county. 
 There were said to be thirteen millionaires within ten 
 square miles of Dorking, and the natives were being 
 transformed into a race of hotel keepers, butlers, 
 chauffeurs and shopmen. Two hundred motor-cars 
 could be counted in an hour on the high road from 
 London to Portsmouth on a fine Sunday. The " Box 
 Hill Hotel" on God's Day was almost enough to pro- 
 voke the Church of England into a religious revival. A 
 beautifully tarred road ran past it, and thirty to forty 
 motor-cars at a time were drawn up in front of it. It 
 bulged with people redolent of the Stock Exchange 
 and the third line of the chorus. They sat in rows on 
 the veranda, drinking, smoking and playing with toy 
 dogs. Scent and fat fought with the smell of petrol 
 for the major appeal to one's olfactory organs. 
 
 The hotel put up its prices unceasingly, but it 
 seemed that nothing was prohibitive. European wars 
 and petrol restrictions appeared to be without effect 
 on the numbers of joy-riders. 
 
 Tin plates exhibiting advertisements of motor 
 
 188
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 accessories lined the roads, and an enormous notice- 
 board made its appearance during the war, giving full 
 and explicit direction as to how to reach Box Hill 
 Station on the London and Brighton Railway. And 
 every Sunday morning the trains of the Railway Com- 
 pany belched forth scores and scores of people who had 
 come to spend a day in the country. Whole families 
 of prosperous munition makers swarmed up the sides 
 of Box Hill, littering the grass with ginger-beer bottles 
 and paper bags after their fashion, and evoking swing- 
 boats, giant strides and troops of underfed, overworked 
 little donkeys to carry their children for joy rides at 
 the top of the hill. 
 
 The strenuous walker, anxious for scenery and calm, 
 avoided Box Hill on a Sunday. Sightseeing at Mere- 
 dith's Cottage on that day was a pleasure too dear at 
 the price. 
 
 And it was the inn at Burford Bridge the word 
 " inn " is important that not forty years ago had 
 inspired in Stevenson a fancy of romance, a fancy that 
 " some frosty night a horseman on a tragic errand 
 would rattle with his whip on the green shutters of the 
 inn at Burford ! " Meredith too had written at Box 
 Hill. . . . 
 
 This sort of thing was happening more or less all 
 over Surrey. Every Sunday it was as if the suburbs 
 had spawned, and the big houses grew in time to be 
 surrounded by a sort of rash of red villas, like the rash 
 that surrounds a tumour or some other unhealthy 
 growth. Bookham, Esher, Claygate, and, farther to 
 the east, Woldingham and Caterham, had already 
 been overtaken by the malady. 
 
 But there were places still untouched, out of reach 
 of any but the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway, 
 
 189
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 which is no communication at all, and away from the 
 high roads. Blackheath and Pitch Hill are out of 
 reach of any but the most adventurous week-enders. 
 
 The country round Patching is flat and green. If 
 you cut right across it south-west towards Holmwood 
 you come, once Hockley Green is left behind, to lonely 
 places places where the nearest house is a mile and a 
 half away (a good distance this for Surrey), where there 
 is one post only a day, and when it is boggy, as it often 
 is, not even that. 
 
 The Pramps' house possessed all the beauties and the 
 inconveniences of the country residence beloved by 
 artists that is to say, it was an Elizabethan residence 
 covered with ivy, with lattice windows, stone-flagged 
 kitchen, oak beams, rafters, ingle-nooks, open fire- 
 places where the proverbial ox could have been, but 
 never was, roasted, and furniture to match. On the 
 other hand, it had no gas ; all the water had to be 
 pumped ; there was no bath and there was a sawdust 
 arrangement out of doors. 
 
 Hither the Pramp family had retired, Mrs. Pramp 
 with the intention of getting to know the county 
 people, Mr. Pramp to give himself to those activities 
 of the stomach which the experience of forty years' 
 administration and the conversation of his wife had 
 convinced him offered the only prospect of permanent 
 and unalloyed pleasure. 
 
 Alas ! for the vanity of human desire ! All went 
 well until one day, on a visit to Town, Mrs. Pramp was 
 taken to lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. She re- 
 turned a temporarily changed woman. Not only was 
 it wrong on humanitarian grounds for man to prey 
 upon the animals, not only did the flesh food thereby 
 obtained coarsen the spirit, dull the imagination and 
 
 190
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 brutalize the senses, but, until Mrs. Pramp herself set 
 an example by refusing to allow her household to 
 batten upon animal flesh, there was no hope that the 
 horrible custom would ever die out. 
 
 It was by the action of individuals, she told the 
 horrified Mr. Pramp, that society is ultimately moved : 
 for was not society, after all, simply an aggregate of 
 individuals ? Somebody with the courage of his 
 convictions must take a line sometime ; a beginning 
 must be made, an example set. One could only hope 
 that others would be influenced by it. 
 
 " Even if they are not," she finished conclusively, 
 " you would not have me refuse to live up to the 
 highest, as I see it ? I can't deny the light that is in 
 me, can I, dear ? " 
 
 Mr. Pramp deprecated the discussion being dragged 
 up to these high levels. He didn't want to interfere 
 with his wife's " lights," as she saw them, but he saw 
 no reason why they should be shed upon himself. He 
 pointed out that science recognized no ultimate differ- 
 ence between the animal, the vegetable and even the 
 mineral worlds, that the chain of life was continuous 
 from the lowest to the highest without stop or break, 
 and that even Holy Writ, in complete reconciliation, 
 as so often with the latest discoveries of science, recog- 
 nized this in its inspired statement that " all flesh is as 
 grass." He marshalled all his arguments, he summoned 
 all his reasons in defence of his threatened stomach. 
 But he summoned them in vain. Mrs. Pramp was 
 adamant. The strength of her convictions, while she 
 possessed them, was only equalled by their evanescence. 
 Being a woman, she had constant need of belief. She 
 never believed for long, but while she believed, she 
 believed to some purpose. 
 
 191
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 And vegetarianism was only a part of the new creed ; 
 an important part, but not the whole. The flesh 
 must be generally mortified. The chastening involved 
 in the abstention from meat was not in itself sufficient, 
 not sufficient, that is, for the achievement of that 
 complete freedom of the mind, that wholesale emanci- 
 pation of the spirit from the gross and the carnal, which 
 was her real aim. The object of food was to maintain 
 life, and life could be easily maintained on a tithe of the 
 average consumption of the average man. Augustus, 
 for instance, so far from making use of food merely to 
 maintain life, definitely allowed it to injure him by 
 eating far more than was good for his health. But 
 then Augustus did not believe that the object of 
 food had anything to do with maintaining life. He 
 believed that the object of food was to give pleasure, 
 and said so. All to no purpose. Mrs. Pramp held the 
 whip-hand, and her husband could only sigh for the 
 flesh-pots of the past, alleviate his enforced sesceticism 
 by surreptitious visits to the local hotel, and hope 
 that the caprice would be of not more than average 
 duration. Meantime he maintained his digestion in 
 silence, while every kind of patent food, every nauseous 
 elaboration that simplified cooking devices could pro- 
 duce, were introduced into the house. The worst 
 atrocities of the nut butter, " compacto " cake and 
 whole-meal bread type figured on the breakfast-table. 
 Fruit stewed fruit out of tins, that is to say was a 
 staple of every meal. Nuts and a sere old cheese were 
 pressed upon reluctant guests, and the jam, instead of 
 being made of one fruit only, professed to be a mixture 
 of three or four, and was, in fact, a product of none. 
 Tea was weakened by boiled milk " so much healthier, 
 you know," said Mrs. Pramp ; " when it is boiled, it 
 
 192
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 kills the germs " so that one's teacup came to look 
 like a cesspool trying to resist a municipal attempt to 
 turn it into a pond. 
 
 The trouble about vegetarianism is that it requires a 
 culinary excellence far beyond the achievement of the 
 average British housewife to make its concoctions in 
 the smallest degree palatable. Otherwise, what should 
 have been an appetizing dish remains a mere mess of 
 calories. Vegetarianism is, in fact, a challenge to the 
 highest, and of this the ordinary cook is quite oblivious, 
 regarding it as a dodge to simplify cooking and abolish 
 grease, rather than as an elaboration of her art, re- 
 quiring her to put forth the utmost of her power 
 to compensate for the barrenness of her materials. 
 
 The vegetarian cook who was substituted for the old 
 chef Mr. Pramp had brought from India was a nice 
 woman, but her food was beyond description. She 
 had not learnt that the main reason why people eat is, 
 not because they wish to maintain life, but because, as 
 Mr. Pramp asserted, it is a pleasant thing to do, and 
 her food was uncompromisingly healthy. 
 
 All this had happened some two years ago, and Mr. 
 Pramp, who considered that he had lost all his serenity 
 of mind and a clear stone in weight since the beginning 
 of the nut and herb regime, began to fear that he would 
 slowly waste away into his grave, when, most provi- 
 dentially for his peace of stomach, the war came. 
 
 Mrs. Pramp owned no superior in patriotism, and 
 when the catastrophe occurred, thought it due to 
 herself and to her country to effect a complete change 
 in her manner of life. Thus she now came down to 
 breakfast at eight-thirty instead of having it brought 
 to her in bed at ten, found it necessary to increase 
 her dress allowance for one must dress simply in these 
 
 193 N
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 times of trouble, and plain stuffs are always so expen- 
 sive took in two more newspapers, made frequent 
 journeys to London, took down all the pictures in Mr. 
 rramp's study and replaced them by maps, served on 
 numberless committees and always had two, and 
 sometimes three, young officers staying in the house. 
 It was partly due to this latter circumstance (" you 
 can't expect a man to fight on nuts and lettuce," as 
 she put it), more perhaps to the general feeling that 
 the war had changed everything, that her vegetarian- 
 ism fell from her like a worn-out garment. These 
 were stern days, and, much as a vegetarian diet might 
 clarify the intellect and refine the spirit, this was no 
 time for intellectual exercises or spiritual aspiration. 
 It was not indeed a time for thinking at all, but for 
 action, and when the world had reverted to the 
 primitive, one might pardon one's household for 
 lapsing into beefsteak. 
 
 Mrs. Pramp, moreover, was now too busy to be 
 messing about with cookery. The old cook brought 
 from India was summoned from the garden, where he 
 had been making ineffectual efforts to cultivate 
 cabbages, and restored to full activity in the kitchen. 
 Mr. Pramp indulged in an orgy of curries which laid 
 him up for a week, and the house became famous even 
 among the young officers for the excellence of its table. 
 
 Ever since that time Mrs. Pramp had never looked 
 back. The word " vegetarian " never passed her lips, 
 and the reaction had carried her to such lengths that 
 Pramp felt justified in his belief that the Christmas 
 fare would amply compensate him for his implied 
 surrender to his mother in the little matter of the club. 
 Besides, his aunt from the colonies was coming his 
 rich aunt ! 
 
 194
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 3 ' '.',:" '\ y 
 
 Pramp's aunt from the colonies was a person of con- 
 siderable importance. Her husband had, by the simple 
 process of acquiring waste tracts of land and rows of 
 unoccupied houses, and turning them respectively into 
 race-courses and hotels, accumulated sufficient cash to 
 enable him to buy for himself a prominent place as 
 a representative of the people in the appropriate 
 Colonial Parliament. 
 
 His wife, however, dazzled for a time by the succes- 
 sive eminences to which her husband's dollars had 
 raised her, began to long at the age of a still attractive 
 forty-three for the " culture " of the old country, and 
 to stigmatize the colonies as given over to the pursuit 
 of a ruthless moneymaking, which left no room for 
 what she called " the educating humanities." She 
 left her husband in a tiff, crossed to England and 
 installed herself in one of the leading London hotels. 
 It only sharpened the edge of Mrs. Bellairs Jones' 
 contempt for the Colony she had left, that her husband 
 had in her absence been elected Lord Mayor of the 
 capital city and invested with a knighthood the better 
 to support the dignity. 
 
 She was at the time of her appearance in the Pramp 
 household a grass widow of a Lady Mayoress, bereft of 
 those foundation stones, clubs and hospitals, whose 
 openings she felt in her heart of hearts she ought to 
 have been adorning. Her presence in the household 
 was thus something of an event. Her wealth was 
 indisputable, and it was commonly believed that she 
 was loaded with presents for all the inmates. Her 
 spirits, too, were exuberant, and the energy with which 
 she laughed, danced, helped in the kitchen, sang the 
 
 w
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 latest new songs at the piano and talked scandal to 
 Mrs. Pramp left no room for doubting that she was a 
 person at least to be reckoned with. 
 
 She and Mrs. Pramp at once struck up one of those 
 intimate women's friendships that are known to bloom 
 and mature in a day. Their Christian names, Nancy 
 and Ida, were continually on one another's lips, and it 
 was soon discovered that it was impossible for them to 
 be together without linking their arms. 
 
 Instinctively almost they formed a mutual admira- 
 tion society, of which the only rule was that the praises 
 of the one should be perpetually in process of being 
 sung by the other. Mrs. Pramp expressed unbounded 
 gratitude for Nancy's gladness and blitheness of heart. 
 The impression conveyed was that before the advent 
 of Lady Bellairs Jones the atmosphere of the house had 
 been one of unrelieved gloom, a supposition suffici- 
 ently countenanced by the recent illness of two of the 
 three maids. Now the place was regarded as ablaze 
 with life and happiness to the tune of " How Nancy 
 does cheer us all up " ; " What a ray of sunshine in the 
 house she is " ; " How I love to hear her merry 
 laugh." Of her voice, which was execrable, she said, 
 " It makes us all happy to hear Nancy singing at the 
 piano." 
 
 Nancy's theme, on the other hand, was the un- 
 bounded practical capacity of Ida, combined with her 
 kindness of heart. 
 
 " Isn't your mother wonderful, Arthur ? " she would 
 say twenty times a day to Pramp, whose natural 
 politeness usually prompted him to reply that perhaps 
 she was. Whether it was her sewing, her perpetual 
 youth, her embroidery, her services at the local 
 hospital, her jams, her histrionic powers each phase of 
 
 196
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 her numerous activities was the theme of fresh bursts 
 of wonder and adulation. 
 
 At meal-times these two ladies entirely dominated 
 the conversation, descanting each on the variety of the 
 other's accomplishments, or, as sometimes happened, 
 on the favourable contrast which each presented to, 
 and the favourable effect which each produced upon, 
 the other ladies of their acquaintance. 
 
 The main divergences from these attractive topics 
 were the attempts made by Mr. Pramp, who was of an 
 informative turn, to instruct Nancy in the geography 
 and customs of the British Isles, of which she appeared 
 refreshingly ignorant. 
 
 Thus, after she had betrayed in full measure the 
 Colonial's expected wonder and delight at the sight of 
 snow, he would inform her that snow was a common 
 phenomenon in these islands and descant on the 
 precise nature of the atmospheric condition required 
 to produce it. 
 
 " When I was at Carlisle," he said, " we used to 
 have snow on the ground for weeks together." 
 
 " How interesting ! Where is Carlisle ? " Nancy 
 would reply. 
 
 " Oh, in the north of England," said Mr. Pramp, 
 deeming that more precise indications of its topo- 
 graphy would be lost upon her. 
 
 At which, surprisingly she brought out, " And 
 where is the north of England ? " whereupon Arthur, 
 going off into uncontrollable laughter, was rebuked by 
 his mother for showing disrespect to Nancy's natural 
 ignorance of the geography of these islands in which 
 she had never lived. 
 
 " You must use your imagination, Arthur," said 
 Mrs. Pramp on another occasion when Pramp had been 
 
 197
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 unable to retain his mirth at a description by Lady 
 Bellairs Jones of a hospital where she had been to visit 
 a poor wounded soldier as " lying just outside the City 
 of Kent," " Aunt Nancy can't be expected to know as 
 much as we do about England. You must remember 
 that England to your auntie is quite a tiny, unim- 
 portant speck on the map. She might want to laugh 
 at your not knowing where Batangy is, where she was 
 born, you know. But I am sure she would have better 
 manners than to do such a thing." 
 
 " Never mind, Ida," said Nancy, " I am sure Arthur 
 didn't mean to be unkind. He was just a little 
 thoughtless, like young men are." 
 
 " Yes, dear, but he ought not to laugh at you," said 
 Ida with finality. 
 
 Luckily at this moment the conversation was lulled 
 by the sounds of Rachmaninoff's prelude, the pre- 
 mature burial one, being brayed out by the gramophone 
 which had recently been installed in the gardener's 
 cottage, not more than fifty yards from the drawing- 
 room window. 
 
 " Listen ! " said Ida, with raised hand, and there was 
 an ecstatic silence. It was a point of honour with both 
 ladies to be passionately fond of music. Nancy's col- 
 lection of songs from the halls and the revues was 
 indeed very extensive, and Ida had had the piano 
 tuned quite recently. 
 
 Nancy, moreover, had a daughter, Janet, in the 
 colonies, who was alleged to be " really a lovely 
 player," and " who could rattle off Chopin and all 
 those fellows with the best of them." It was to the 
 spirit of Janet that Nancy now appealed. 
 
 " What a lovely thing that is," she said, breaking the 
 silence. " How well I know it. Janet is always 
 
 198
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 playing it, Ida ; you wouldn't believe ; and I could sit 
 there all day listening to her. It makes my heart feel 
 all queer and palpitating the best music always does, 
 you know and Janet plays it exquisitely and with 
 such feeling. How well I can see her now." 
 
 " I'm sure she does," said Ida. " What is the piece, 
 by the way ? " 
 
 " Oh ! one of Beethoven's etudes \ " said Nancy 
 airily. 
 
 " Of course," said Ida ; " how stupid of me to 
 forget." 
 
 This time the unfortunate Arthur had to leave the 
 room to hide his mirth. When he came back a dis- 
 cussion on Wagner was in progress. Ida was expressing 
 her dislike of Wagner. He was dull and morbid and 
 never had any tunes. " Whenever he finds himself 
 going off into a tune, he stops himself. I suppose he 
 thinks it beneath him. But I dare say why I don't like 
 it is because I've only heard his music in England. 
 I'm so glad I never went to Germany now. I dare say 
 Wagner would sound all right in Germany ; it has to 
 have its proper setting, you know, and in the coarse and 
 brutal surroundings of Germany it might sound quite 
 all right. You know," she continued by way of illus- 
 tration, " how horrid the bagpipes are outside Scot- 
 land, and yet they are quite nice when you hear them 
 in the Highlands. They seem appropriate there, 
 somehow." 
 
 " I don't know how it is, but I've grown to dislike 
 anything German this last year or two," said Nancy. 
 " No one at home has any German pictures left now. 
 I had one which used to be considered a very fine 
 picture in our dining-room at Batangy, a Madonna, 
 you know, by Raphael, I think it was. But I took it 
 
 199
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 down last summer because a business friend of Bert's 
 said the woman had such a German face, it was a 
 disgrace to have it there. And when I came to look 
 at it, she had, you know ; you know what I mean, one 
 of those soft, puddingy, doughy faces, something 
 animal about it, I thought. I had the picture broken 
 up and used to light the kitchen fire with." 
 
 And with this display of iconoclasm the ladies 
 drifted from art and politics to the more familiar 
 theme of the placing of the guests at the Christmas 
 dinner, and whether the cut-glass finger bowls would 
 be nicer than the porcelain, or the porcelain than the 
 cut-glass. 
 
 4 
 
 " Oh dear ! oh dear ! " said Mrs. Pramp on the 
 morning of Christmas Day, " I don't know what's 
 coming to Arthur ! " 
 
 " What has he done now ? " said Nancy. 
 
 " What hasn't he done ? Sacrilege, I call it, and on 
 Christmas Day, too. I had specially put up over his 
 bed the pictures he used to sleep under when he was a 
 little boy : one was that picture of a little girl kneeling 
 down and saying her prayers, and the other was one of 
 Our Blessed Lord talking to little children. I thought 
 their old associations would soften him and perhaps 
 help him to be a better boy to his mother ; and this 
 morning when I went up to his room I found he had 
 taken them both down and thrown them under his 
 bed. On Christmas morning, too ! I do call it unkind 
 of him, and to think how I've loved him. I can't think 
 how he has the heart to make his mother so unhappy. 
 He wouldn't be so selfish if he knew." Here Mrs. 
 Pramp burst into tears. " Oh dear, oh dear, there's 
 
 200
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 more trouble over one thing and another than over 
 anything I know," she added enigmatically. 
 
 " What a shame," sympathized Nancy, who had not 
 been attending very closely ; "I should have thought 
 he would sooner have a picture of Our Blessed Lord 
 over his bed than any old racehorse." 
 
 " Racehorse," said Mrs. Pramp ; " I never said any- 
 thing about racehorses. I'm sure my boy knows better 
 than to go in for such a low thing as betting. He 
 wouldn't be his mother's son if he did. I wouldn't 
 own him." 
 
 " I thought you said he had put up a picture of a 
 racehorse over his bed," said Nancy. 
 
 " It's bad enough for him to take down the pictures 
 of his childhood without putting up any racehorses. 
 I can't think how you came to suggest such a thing, 
 Nancy." 
 
 "'I'm sorry, dear ; I must have been mistaken. We 
 are sometimes, you know, aren't we ? And I expect 
 you are worried over the dinner and all the prepara- 
 tions. He's no business to put you out so." 
 
 Mrs. Pramp was worried. The Christmas dinner 
 and the arrangements ancillary thereto loomed over the 
 house like an impending Moloch of good form, to which 
 comfort, ease, security and joviality were in turn to be 
 sacrificed, so that it became impious to breathe a word 
 or harbour a thought in the house that did not touch 
 directly or indirectly upon the dinner. 
 
 Five guests were coming, three gentlemen and two 
 ladies. One of the gentlemen was the local vicar, in 
 whose church Mr. Pramp, senior, read the lessons with 
 considerable pomp every Sunday. There were also a 
 married couple, notable for their mutual deafness, 
 their consequent connubial harmony (for it was no use 
 
 201
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 their saying unpleasant things to each other even if 
 they had wanted to), and their skill at auction bridge, 
 and there were Pramp's friends from London, Eric 
 and Queenie Ashley, who had come down for the 
 night. 
 
 Mrs. Pramp did not quite like the look of Eric and 
 Queenie. She was a little doubtful of Queenie's 
 antecedents ; she thought her evening dress too low 
 and Eric's too greasy. His hair was certainly too long. 
 Her instinct of distrust was surer than she knew. 
 
 Eric and Queenie can best be described as members 
 of the modern intelligentsia. They were Mivians and 
 Pacifists. 
 
 As Mivians they had married, but kept this fact 
 secret from their parents. This, in their case, was 
 something of a feat even under modern conditions. 
 They lived with their respective parents in the same 
 road, in point of fact opposite to each other, and the 
 two families had known, visited and heartily despised 
 one another for as long as Eric and Queenie had been 
 in existence. 
 
 Latterly the families had openly quarrelled, largely 
 because Eric, who had something of a suburban reputa- 
 tion for his achievements among women, was thought 
 to be paying too marked attentions to Queenie. 
 
 He was asked by Queenie's parents what his inten- 
 tions were, and replied naturally enough that he hadn't 
 any. He was then forbidden the house after a round- 
 table row of a kind which it is needless to describe 
 here, as many examples may be found in the works of 
 Mr. Shaw and Mr. Wells. 
 
 In her early twenties Queenie became emancipated. 
 That is to say, she was introduced by Eric to the 
 Mivian Society, and succumbed to it. She despised 
 
 202
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 families, was in favour of women's rights and women's 
 incomes, and replied to Eric's offer of marriage, that 
 she didn't mind living with him for a bit, and that if 
 marriage was the most convenient way of doing it, she 
 didn't mind marriage ; but anyhow she must have a 
 separate establishment and control of her own income. 
 
 On these terms they were married ; but as their 
 means did not permit of two separate establishments 
 of their own, they continued to live in their parents' 
 houses, Queenie not daring to inform her people of 
 the marriage for fear of active hostilities against Eric 
 by her brothers, who were second lieutenants in the 
 Army, and Eric maintaining a similar reticence with his 
 sole remaining parent his mother who was too much 
 of a dear old fool of a woman to make it pleasant to 
 shock her by the news that her son was married to a 
 girl who did not live with him. 
 
 It should be noted that although Queenie's house 
 was closed to Eric, Eric's was not closed to Queenie ; 
 and Queenie spent half her spare time over the road 
 she worked for her living as private secretary to a 
 business man decently chaperoned by Eric's mother, 
 an inveterate matchmaker, who spent much of her 
 time wondering if they would ever marry. 
 
 Thus it happened that the only people who did not 
 know of this marriage were the parents and relations of 
 the principals. Their friends knew without exception, 
 a circumstance which provides a singular comment upon 
 the wide divorce between the lives of parents and 
 children in these latter days. The parents are unac- 
 quainted with the most intimate friends of the children, 
 in whose lives anything of importance is carefully 
 withheld from them. In the present case the news of 
 the marriage, common talk among at least two hundred 
 
 203
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 people in London, never penetrated to the innocent 
 parents. 
 
 It may be asked how long was this to last ? How 
 long would human passion, resident presumably in 
 husband and wife, permit this continuance of neigh- 
 bourly celibacy, legitimate outlet now being sanctioned 
 by the law of the State ? The answer is to be found in 
 the other aspect of Eric not yet considered. Eric was 
 a Pacifist. 
 
 A strong opponent of war on principle and of the 
 Great War in practice, he had refused to attest when 
 urged to do so by the business firm to which he 
 belonged. Soon afterwards it was intimated to him, 
 and he was cynical enough to trace sequence of cause 
 and effect between the two events, that he could no 
 longer be regarded as indispensable. He took no 
 notice of the intimation and continued his duties as 
 usual, whereupon he was granted a holiday for an 
 indefinite period without pay. 
 
 His tribunal to whom he appealed on conscientious 
 grounds would make him no concession, apparently on 
 the ground that the person whose opinions were really 
 at issue at the present juncture was not Eric but his 
 father, and that as Eric's father had not been a Quaker, 
 therefore, though Eric was a Quaker of his own free 
 will, he was not in the eyes of the Military Service Act 
 really a Quaker, and his conscientious objection could 
 not be genuine. Eric could not but admire the chain 
 of reasoning but deprecated the conclusion, and had 
 now for some months past been awaiting arrest. 
 Whether the respite was owing to the indulgence of the 
 military authorities or to the defectiveness of their 
 clerical machinery, it could not be expected to last, 
 and a man who may count upon being arrested every
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 day can hardly be expected to establish a permanent 
 abode and install a wife therein. 
 
 It will be seen, then, that Mrs. Pramp was thoroughly 
 justified in her failure to like the looks of Eric and 
 Queenie. Still they were there now, and would have 
 to go in to dinner with the rest. 
 
 The great question was the arrangement of the 
 table. Nancy, as the lady pre-eminent in wealth and 
 distinguished as something of a traveller, would sit on 
 Mr. Pramp's right ; the Vicar would, of course, sit on 
 Mrs. Pramp's right. That much was clear. The 
 married couple, Eric and Queenie, and Pramp formed 
 an amorphous conglomerate of comparative nonentities 
 whose exact allocation, beyond the fact that Pramp 
 must take in the deaf married lady, was found so 
 difficult that it was not settled, and was left in the 
 end to chance. 
 
 The order of precedence for the procession from the 
 drawing-room, where one assembled, to the dining- 
 room, where one ate, was also an important question, 
 requiring earnest consideration between Ida and 
 Nancy, each insisting with a pleasing display of self- 
 sacrifice on the other going in first with her partner. 
 Nancy finally won the day, because Ida was so long 
 dressing that she was late and lost the front place. 
 
 The dinner began to make itself felt from an early 
 hour, and as the day wore on the adjuncts of this 
 portentous feast spread themselves in an increasing 
 wave of comestibles all over the house. The wines 
 and dessert were laid out in the morning-room ; the 
 liqueurs and coffee apparatus in the library ; the sofa 
 spawned with crystallized fruits and Carlsbad plums ; 
 the things from the morning-room and the library had 
 to be moved into Pramp's bedroom to make room for 
 
 205
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 the dessert, coffee, etc. ; the piano had been moved into 
 the corridor, and the inhabitants of the house, when 
 not engaged in talking about, or otherwise preparing 
 for, the dinner were removed to the top story to be 
 out of the way, with the exception of Nancy, who went 
 about all day with a solicitous face calling attention to 
 the miracle of Ida's exertions. 
 
 " Isn't Ida wonderful, taking it all on herself like 
 this," she would ask. " How she'll have time to get 
 dressed as well as superintend the dinner, I don't know." 
 
 However, Ida did find time for both, and finally 
 came down only two minutes late resplendent in white 
 satin, but tired and a little testy. 
 
 The meal comprised nine good courses ; in case, 
 however, any uncomfortable feeling might arise on the 
 score that this was a household guilty of food extra- 
 vagance, Ida had carefully pinned up over the mantel- 
 piece a newspaper cutting containing a speech by the 
 Food Controller, pleading for economy in food, as the 
 most potent form of patriotism, the cutting being 
 pasted on a piece of cardboard headed " To be remem- 
 bered four times a day." 
 
 5 
 
 " Young people have more liberty than they did in 
 my day," the Vicar was saying. " I only hope they 
 won't abuse it." 
 
 The speaker might have consciously modelled him- 
 self on the subject of Mr. Praed's famous poem " The 
 Vicar," were he not obviously too simple and unaffected 
 an old dear ever to model himself on anybody. As a 
 young man he had been noted for his cleverness and 
 wit ; he had obtained a double First at Oxford, and 
 
 206
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 when he took Holy Orders soon after, the Church, 
 more usually a 'pis aller for double Thirds, might 
 justly pride herself on a valuable recruit. 
 
 While he still thought it a difficult thing to be 
 clever, he bewildered his congregation by the abstruse- 
 ness of his sermons, and his parishioners by the ebullience 
 of his wit. But the desire to appear clever passed in 
 the thirties, and his sermons grew more intelligible as 
 they certainly became more commonplace. His wit, 
 however, nothing could suppress, and as he had no 
 need to make money by turning his brains to writing 
 or reviewing, it remained unspoilt by efforts to make 
 it give plausible reasons for the admiration of trash. 
 
 A certain genial tolerance, however, precluded his 
 advancement in the Church. He held so obviously that 
 no creed was sufficiently valuable to justify one in 
 making things uncomfortable for those who did not 
 share it, that he was suspected of lack of zeal, a sus- 
 picion which was just enough, for he could be paid no 
 greater compliment than that implied by the common 
 observation of his friends, that the least noticeable 
 thing in the vicar was his religion. This failure to 
 exhibit beliefs was perhaps the pleasantest thing about 
 him ; it was certainly the reason why people of the 
 most various descriptions treated him as a friend and 
 confidant, his partiality for sinners being so scandalous 
 that one could not conceive of him as blaming them. 
 Mr. Pramp was a man after his own heart, and he 
 was a constant visitor to the house, his treatment of 
 Mrs. Pramp being perfect. To the young he was 
 especially tolerant. He welcomed all those who prided 
 themselves on being advanced in thought, while gently 
 mocking at the crudities that youth and heterodoxy 
 brought in their train. He liked the look of Eric and 
 
 207
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 did not very much mind if he did abuse his liberty, 
 provided he had it. 
 
 " I doubt whether it is possible for us to do that," 
 said Eric. " The worst that can come of it is that we 
 should make a muck of our lives. But they are our 
 lives, and we have a right to do with them as we please. 
 Suppose we do go to the devil : well, every one has a 
 right to go to the devil in his own way ! It is at 
 least better than going to Heaven some one else's 
 way." 
 
 " That's a dangerous doctrine, don't you think, and 
 even if I were to agree to it in principle, do you admit 
 you have nothing to learn from the knowledge and 
 experience of those of us who at least have seen more 
 of the world than yourselves ? " 
 
 " What does your knowledge and experience come 
 to after all ? You have only experienced your own 
 lives : does that experience give you the right to 
 mislead those whose experience is bound to be different 
 because their lives are different ? Experience seems to 
 me to warp the mind rather than to enlarge it. It is 
 a sort of distorting medium that comes between a man 
 and a true vision of the world. If, for instance, he 
 earns his living, as most men do, he comes only to see 
 things through the spectacles of his own profession ; 
 if he specializes in a branch of learning, his special 
 knowledge is like a pair of blinkers, which restrict his 
 view and focus life for him in a wrong perspective. 
 When we know, we are at the mercy of our own facts ; 
 they narrow our vision and, from the very circum- 
 stance of their being partial, distort it. It is better 
 to know nothing than to know some things only. 
 God, I imagine, understands everything and knows 
 nothing." 
 
 208
 
 " God knows at least the futility of our attempt to 
 estimate His knowledge." 
 
 " Well, whatever be your theory of the value of 
 experience," pursued Eric, " look at its effect in prac- 
 tice. Old men rule the world, old men with experi- 
 ence, mind you, old men chosen for their experience, 
 and they are driving it to destruction at breakneck 
 pace. Old men, for example, are the Governments, 
 and look what a muddle they have made of things, 
 their notion of governing being to be at one another's 
 throats. If Governments were composed exclusively 
 of men under twenty-five, I wouldn't mind betting 
 there would be no more wars." 
 
 Mr. Pramp did not like the turn the conversation 
 was taking. He had long had occasion to view with 
 apprehension the inconvenient, not to say improper 
 remarks, that his son would insist on making about the 
 war, and had learnt to steer warily round that all-absorb- 
 ing topic at any rate in the shallows of mixed society. 
 It seemed that Arthur's friends were evincing the same 
 unpleasant symptoms as Arthur himself. It would 
 never do to pain the dear Vicar, the weight of whose 
 years was so apparent that he could not help applying to 
 himself some of Eric's sweeping and ill-judged generali- 
 zations about the old. 
 
 Mr. Pramp hastened therefore to create a diversion 
 by reverting to that topic out of which the unfortunate 
 discussion had arisen, the topic of Arthur's joining the 
 Ephemeral Club. As the ladies had already withdrawn, 
 he felt that he could express himself with more toler- 
 ance and magnanimity on the subject than he would 
 have ventured to do in the presence of his wife. 
 
 " Well, as you were saying, Vicar," he broke in, 
 " these young people have so much liberty nowadays 
 
 209 o
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 that we seem almost to have lost the right to refuse 
 them what they want. I expect in the long run we 
 shall have to give way to Arthur about this ridiculous 
 club he wants to join." 
 
 " I think you might," said the Vicar. " He's bound 
 to join it whether you like it or not, so you might as 
 well consent with a good grace." 
 
 But Eric, who had drunk a good deal of Madeira, 
 once launched upon the seas of generalization, was not 
 so easily to be diverted by the disinclination of his 
 elders to discuss whatever lay outside their own range 
 of interests. He was mounted on his hobby horse 
 " Individualism," and had a long way to ride yet. 
 
 " I wonder you agree to that, Vicar," he said. 
 " Don't you see that all this self-assertion of the young 
 is but one aspect of the prevailing Individualism of the 
 twentieth century, which is the very negation of the 
 religion you teach." 
 
 " But Christ Himself was an Individualist. " He 
 believed in the supreme value of each human life ; in 
 the sacredness of personality." 
 
 " And like all good Individualists He spent His time 
 and energy in preaching Socialism. Socialism means 
 sacrifice and subordination of the individual in the 
 interests of society as a whole. The Individualism 
 which was the prevailing creed in the early nineteenth 
 century and again permeates the mind of the country 
 to-day, expresses the refusal of the individual to sub- 
 ordinate himself to anything or anybody, if he can get 
 the better of them. Darwin began it with his ' Origin 
 of Species.' The animal who is most efficient in his 
 own interest survives. Cultivate efficiency in your own 
 interest to the neglect of others, if you want to live. 
 All very pleasant this for the essentially pagan and 
 
 210
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 conquering male of western civilization, chafing 
 against meekness and humility for a couple of thousand 
 years and terribly embarrassed by the renunciations of 
 Christianity a form of diet that has always sat ill upon 
 his stomach. So he lapped up Darwin's evolutionary 
 doctrines like mother's milk, and when Herbert Spencer 
 went on to tell him that the interest of every individual 
 in an organism was supreme over the interest of the 
 whole organism, the doctrine of individual self-assertion 
 was fully launched. 
 
 " Pagan to the backbone all this, mind you, for pre- 
 sently Nietzsche came along and pushed the theory a 
 stage further by pointing out that the successful 
 survivor in the struggle was obviously exempt from 
 moral restraint. The cock on the dunghill may laugh 
 at the moral foibles of the hens down in the yard : 
 hence try to be the cock. All very attractive this 
 Superman business and hopelessly unchristian. You 
 remember Nietzsche's view of Christian morality as a 
 commodity fit for the consumption of ' cows, women 
 and Englishmen.' Meanwhile we get Oscar Wilde 
 giving the thing an ethical twist, by making a merit of 
 expression for its own sake in the interest of perfect 
 self-expression, ' The only way to get rid of temptation 
 is to yield to it,' and so forth ; and Galton, Karl 
 Pearson and the Eugenists calmly drawing up recipes 
 for the infallible production of the efficient individual, 
 and the elimination of the feeble, stupid, humble, meek 
 and non-assertive, on strictly Nietzschean principles. 
 In Germany the doctrine gets into politics and we 
 have the individually assertive State rushing into war : 
 in England characteristically into economics, and we 
 get the laissez-faire theory of Bentham and the Mills, 
 which means in effect the fundamental right of every 
 
 211
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 business man to fleece the Community as much as he 
 can within the generous limits of the law, and to sweat 
 his workmen to the limit of their capacity to work 
 compatible with their continued existence, this latter 
 right, though, being somewhat curtailed by that unfor- 
 tunate lapse into Collectivism known as the Factory 
 Acts. Now the doctrine spreads to the working 
 classes ; we see . . ." 
 
 " Surely among the working classes," the Vicar 
 ventured, " this prevailing doctrine you describe takes 
 the form of Socialism, of Collectivism or of Com- 
 munism, of all of which it is the essential feature that 
 the individual must subordinate himself to society, to 
 the State, or to the service of his fellows. Individual 
 self-assertion is stigmatized by all these creeds as the 
 root cause of the evils of society to-day, and as a 
 consequence no individual, it is argued, should be paid 
 more in power or possessions than his fellows for his 
 services to society." 
 
 " I am afraid all that is dreadfully out of date," 
 said Eric. '* It is the sort of thing that idealistic 
 Socialism used to mean twenty years ago. But all 
 the early fire and enthusiasm have gone out of those 
 creeds ; they have been captured by the Fabians and 
 become respectable. Socialism used to be an affair of 
 red ties and long hair ; it has become a business of red 
 tape and safety razors, and no working man really 
 believes in it. The working man has no use for good 
 will, service and subordination, and so in place of 
 Socialism we have Syndicalism, in which the same 
 characteristics of assertion based on force recur ; only 
 here it is the assertion not of the individual, but of the 
 class. Syndicalism has no use for the State or the 
 Community. It asserts the rights of the working class 
 
 212
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 as producers, and blandly bids the rest of the Com- 
 munity to go to blazes. It is intensely individual, 
 bidding the working classes to continue to assert their 
 individuality by strike after strike until finally they 
 impose it upon the Community at large by means of 
 the General Strike. Read Sorel and see ; Nietzche's 
 super-man is Sorel's super-working class." 
 
 " I think there is something in what you say, 
 although I am not very well acquainted with advanced 
 Socialist thought. But surely you are wrong in saying 
 that Collectivism is discredited, and that the extension 
 of social will and effort as expressed in the State is 
 waning. Apart altogether from the additional func- 
 tions assumed by the State during the war, it was 
 even before the war extending its scope in every 
 direction. It ran the post office, it took over the 
 telephone service, it proposed to nationalize the rail- 
 ways ; it was assuming responsibilities for health, 
 housing, sanitation and Labour troubles, and extending 
 its scope in a hundred directions. I didn't like it, I 
 must confess. I hate the State poking its officials in 
 at my door to see whether the dog's got rabies or the 
 baby's teething properly ; and I hate it because I, too, 
 am an Individualist of the sort you describe, and don't 
 like deferring to society over my drains." 
 
 " Yes, all that is true enough in a way," said Eric. 
 " The State was extending itself all over the shop 
 before the war ; but somehow it didn't touch the 
 individual. The individual never came across the 
 State except when he had to pay taxes, serve on juries, 
 or vote, none of them activities about which he cared 
 twopence. All the things that really mattered in his 
 life, that is to say, whatever touched his pocket, gratified 
 his stomach, or enriched his soul, went on quite inde- 
 
 213
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 pendently of the State. His business cut right across 
 the State's borders and embraced partners in different 
 States on the other side of the world. His religion had 
 gradually ceased to have anything to do with the 
 State church, and went on inside queer individualistic 
 societies like the Theosophical Society. His love affairs 
 again ! Even if he did get married in a registry office, 
 it was in fear of public opinion and not in deference 
 to the State. No ! the State was getting gradually 
 squeezed out of the life of the individual. The 
 individual was reasserting himself. 
 
 "Now just take the business of marriage, for in- 
 stance," continued Eric, drinking some more Madeira 
 and warming to his subject. " Marriage is supposed 
 to be an affair in which both the Church and the State 
 have an interest. In so far as it is supposed to pro- 
 duce happiness, it comes under the surveillance of the 
 Church ; in so far as its object is to produce children, 
 under that of the State. Marriage has never been 
 entirely the affair of the individuals concerned. That 
 is why we make a public exhibition of weddings. 
 Now it is part of the Individualism of the age that both 
 Church and State are being gradually squeezed out of 
 marriage. People marry now mainly as a matter of 
 convenience, because they can't stand the prying of 
 landladies, or as a matter of necessity to legitimize 
 their unborn children. Marriage is the most unimpor- 
 tant of episodes in a purely individual relationship 
 that has usually extended for some time before it. 
 Similarly divorce, which is also a State institution, is 
 practically falling into disuse except among society, to 
 whom it gives the pleasing effect of a new sensation, and 
 the middle classes who are, of course, hopelessly moral. 
 People never dream of bringing in the State or the law 
 
 214
 
 with their clumsy machinery, when they have had 
 enough of each other ; they just make other arrange- 
 ments. Nobody, in fact, in his senses would think of 
 submitting his intimate personal relationships, which 
 are something delicate and complex, to the handling 
 of the State, whose only method of disentangling a 
 Gordian knot is to cut it with a bludgeon. 
 
 Marriage only subsists and will only continue to 
 subsist as a State institution so long as the business of 
 being a wife remains the only form of livelihood open 
 to most women. While it does, they want State 
 regulations to guarantee the continuance of their 
 employment, and prevent their being turned on the 
 streets, as often as a husband changes his mind and his 
 wife. That is why women are always so bitterly 
 resentful of any attack on marriage and the family 
 system, a resentment which poses as moral indignation, 
 but is really economic at bottom, being akin to the 
 Trade Union objection to dilution. That is why 
 women are such dragons of intolerance to their so- 
 called erring sisters ; I do not mean to prostitutes, 
 whom they tolerate, knowing them to be the necessary 
 condition of their own purity but to those who refuse 
 to allow their affections to be confined within the 
 limited channels prescribed by the law. Such women 
 are hated and feared as amateurs are hated and feared 
 by professionals." 
 
 Mr. Pramp again did not like the turn the conver- 
 sation was taking. He did not understand all that Eric 
 was saying, but he felt pretty sure that the Vicar did, 
 and that it was as bad, if not worse, than Eric on the war. 
 
 " Well, well, Mr. Ashley," he said, " we are perhaps 
 getting too interested in our conversation and for- 
 getting the ladies. Shall we adjourn I " 
 
 215
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 The appearance of the drawing-room conveyed that 
 atmosphere of silent reproach which usually awaits 
 gentlemen whose conversation has kept them beyond 
 the allotted period. It was a drawing-room of the old- 
 fashioned sort, the particular joy and sanctum of Mrs. 
 Pramp. The main object in furnishing it seemed to 
 have been to ascertain how many different kinds of 
 articles an unoffending room could be made to hold ; 
 the main purpose of the furniture to conceal other 
 furniture. Tables of knick-knacks abounded, the wall 
 was covered with pictures and brackets, the mantel- 
 piece was hidden under a scurf of ornaments, and 
 draperies of the pretty variety adorned everything. 
 Even the legs of the grand piano were draped, appar- 
 ently in the belief that, being legs, they were in some 
 obscure way indecent. It was one of those rooms in 
 which it was impossible to be at ease either in body or 
 mind, a regular stiff collar of a room. 
 
 The elder ladies Mrs. Pramp, Nancy and the deaf 
 lady having sewed and gossiped themselves into a tor- 
 por suitable for the reception of their husbands, sat in 
 rigid attitudes in their chairs, that looked like arm- 
 chairs, but were not, before the fire. Queenie, who 
 quite obviously had not mixed, was listlessly turning 
 over piles of music near the piano. 
 
 Mr. Pramp, who seemed fated to create diversions 
 that evening, felt that something ought to be done, and 
 vaguely remembering a reference by his son to Mrs. 
 Ashley's " wonderful playing," asked if she had per- 
 formed at the piano. No ! It seemed she had not. 
 
 " Then will you play something to us now, Mrs. 
 Ashley ? " he said. 
 
 " Oh, do," put in Nancy. " I simply adore music. 
 I was only telling Ida the other night how little of it I 
 
 216
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 had heard since I've been in England. Somebody was 
 playing that thing of Beethoven's, ' Melody,' I think it 
 is called, down at the gardener's cottage, and it brought 
 back such memories." 
 
 " But don't you play yourself ? " said Queenie, 
 politely going to the piano. 
 
 " Oh, a little to amuse myself, you know. But I 
 only play ragtimes and songs, and I always think they 
 are really not the best kind of music, don't you ? One 
 tires of them so, you know." 
 
 Queenie played a piece of Ravel's, and followed it 
 up with Debussy's " Cathedrale Engloutie." The 
 applause was decorous, but subdued. Nobody had 
 liked the music, and Pramp, who worshipped Bach and 
 Mozart, was anxious for Queenie to play what he called 
 " real music." But the house had got on her nerves, 
 she wanted to play something " edgy," and pieces by 
 John Ireland (or was it Cyril Scott ?) they all sounded 
 alike, thought Pramp followed. 
 
 As the ingenious discords vibrated among the knick- 
 knacks, Pramp slipped out into the smoking-room, 
 where he found the Vicar and his father drinking port. 
 A look of satisfaction upon their faces reflected equally 
 their pleasure in the port and their escape from the 
 women. 
 
 " That Mr. Ashley of yours is an interesting young 
 man, Arthur," said Mr. Pramp, " but how he does 
 talk." 
 
 " Yes, he's always pretty voluble, but I think that 
 Madeira of yours accounted for most of it to-night." 
 
 " Ah, but he talks well, my boy," said the Vicar. " I 
 disagree with much of what he said, and it has a good 
 deal of the hardness and empty broad-mindedness of 
 the ideas of a very young man ; but his account of the 
 
 217
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 return of Individualism to the world is, I think, sub- 
 stantially a just one." 
 
 " Oh, that's all right enough," said Pramp. " You've 
 only to go into the drawing-room now and hear his 
 wife playing modern music to see how universal it is." 
 
 " I am afraid I don't quite see the connexion." 
 
 " Well, all the great musicians of the past Bach, 
 Beethoven, Mozart, Handel tried in their music to 
 create something beautiful. In order to be beautiful 
 it had to have a certain amount of form I mean, it had 
 to have a fairly continuous and coherent structure 
 and it must not entirely disown melody. It was music 
 that expressed the soul of the composer right enough, 
 but his object in composing it was not this expression of 
 himself. Like all great art, it transcends the personality 
 of the composer and achieves the impersonality of the 
 Universal." (Pramp, who, it will be remembered, had 
 read Philosophy at Oxford, was rather proud of his 
 metaphysical terms.) " That is why this music of the 
 great classical epoch is so absorbing and so objective, if 
 I may use such a word. It doesn't allow you to think of 
 anything at all except itself ; it certainly does not make 
 you wonder what sort of a person the composer was, or 
 what he meant by this or that ; it does not even make 
 you think of yourself by reminding you of your own 
 past, of a love affair, or the scent of a lady's hair as, for 
 instance, Chopin's music does. You don't, in fact, think 
 at all when listening to it ; you are just lost in the music. 
 
 " Now the moderns Stravinsky, Arensky, Mombom- 
 sky and the Russians generally they don't want to 
 achieve the impersonality of the universal or anything 
 like that : they don't want even to create anything 
 beautiful. All they want to do is to express them- 
 selves, to put their own individuality into music. Their 
 
 218
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 music is intensely personal and individual stuff, like 
 some one speaking to you rather intimately, and be- 
 cause their personality is pretty much like your own 
 you find that their music, instead of making you lose 
 yourself in it, sets you thinking about yourself. You 
 are reminded of scenes and passions you yourself have 
 known, instead of being lifted into a realm greater than 
 any you have ever known. 
 
 "Now all this business of making music express things, 
 desires, moods, hopes, passions, griefs and so on, which 
 is just one more aspect of Eric's Individualism, is a per- 
 version of its function, a putting of music to a wrong 
 use. Considered as a medium of expression, music is 
 simply an inadequate substitute for words. It may 
 express certain emotions in a vague sort of way, but it 
 cannot convey scenes or events with anything like the 
 accuracy of words. But the modern musician won't 
 see this. He cannot create, so he tries to represent and 
 express, and we get programme music. It shows how 
 fundamentally wrong is the attempt to convey scenes 
 or even memories by means of music, that one of your 
 modern pieces entitled ' Night in the Woods ' might 
 just as well call itself * Morning by the Fountain ' for 
 all the notion it conveys to you of either." 
 
 " But all this, interesting as it is, my boy, as a criti- 
 cism of modern musical tendencies, has nothing to do 
 with Individualism." 
 
 " Perhaps very little. I only brought it in to show 
 that once you begin using music as a means of conveying 
 or expressing anything, whether it is your own emo- 
 tions in a park by the moonlight, or the phosphorescent 
 glow of a bad sardine, you are putting it to a wrong use. 
 For one thing, it makes the merit of the music depend 
 upon the extent to which the audience feel the emo- 
 
 219
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 tions which it is intended to convey, which is absurd. 
 You can't have Bach judged dull simply because the 
 audience of shopkeepers, who are usually too tired to 
 listen to him at the fag ends of the promenades in 
 London, don't respond. 
 
 "But what is more important is the fact that musicians 
 only resort to this expression business when they haven't 
 the genius to create. Because they can't hold you by 
 constructing a beautiful thing, they endeavour to 
 attract your attention by evolving a startling discord. 
 The diminished sevenths and cacophonous dishar- 
 monies, the ingenious structures of ill-mated notes and 
 discontinuous chords flitting in sheer caprice from one 
 end of the keyboard to the other, that go to make up a 
 modern composition, are but so many conjurors' tricks, 
 musical sleights of hand, designed to disguise the funda- 
 mentally jejune imagination of the composer." 
 
 " That's very fine," laughed Mr. Pramp, " and quite 
 unnecessarily heated. I suppose, though, that some 
 musical young miss, who likes Debussy, or even com- 
 poses a bit on her own has been jilting you. You don't 
 indulge in such fierce rhetoric about modern painting, 
 do you ? " 
 
 " Oh, I don't know much about painting ; but it 
 seems to me to be on much the same lines. It is be- 
 cause the modern artist has lost the art which enabled 
 the Dutch and Italians to idealize the real by repre- 
 senting only its essence and omitting the superfluous 
 that they make a merit of indicating it only. By all 
 means indicate a telegraph pole when you can't paint 
 one. Very clever and meritorious and all that, but 
 don't go on to assert that by putting down a few 
 sketchy lines and curves that might as well be a hen- 
 coop, you have in some mysterious way got hold of 
 
 220
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 the real nature and being of the telegraph pole, in 
 a way that the man who has merely painted it has 
 missed. 
 
 " Of course it's only another phase of Individualism 
 really. It is more important to express yourself than to 
 represent or idealize the real. That is why modern 
 pictures, however much they may embody the soul of 
 the artist, rarely embody anything else. I know as a 
 fact that a picture which appeared in an exhibition 
 last year entitled ' Portrait of Mrs. Jones,' was hung 
 again this year at the Leicester Galleries without so 
 much as a line being altered over the title, ' Blast 
 Furnaces at Stoke.' It looked about equally like 
 either." 
 
 This sally provoked the laugh which its untruthful- 
 ness deserved, and as Eric entered at the same moment, 
 the Vicar explained to him with what unsoundness his 
 thesis of the return to Individualism had been extended 
 to the regions of painting and music. Eric was an 
 artist in that he held high notions as to the sacred mis- 
 sion of art. Moreover, he disliked agreement from any 
 quarter. He promptly repudiated the application of 
 his views to the creations of art, and expressed himself 
 as convinced that what young Pramp had said must be 
 nonsense anyhow. " Pramp thinks that every modern 
 ass who wants to read decadent poetry by candle-light 
 on a red mat is an artist." 
 
 They were by this time all too muddled from want of 
 sleep or excess of Madeira to pursue any subject with 
 sense, but the Vicar, whose gravity was only increased 
 by wine, insisted on knowing whether Eric thought 
 that these developments of Individualism which he had 
 described were matters for regret or gratification. 
 
 " That depends on the angle of approach, Every- 
 
 221
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 body wants Individualism for himself and resents it in 
 others. The whole problem of politics is, in fact, how 
 to reconcile your desire to tread on the corns of as many 
 other people as you want to, with your prepossession in 
 favour of keeping your own intact. Personally I think 
 it is all to the 'good in those spheres which are exempt 
 from the operations of force, that is to say, in the 
 spheres in which corn-stamping is impossible, those of 
 art and literature, for instance ; and that is where 
 Pramp, who can't understand a line of poetry and 
 thinks music ought to be a sort of glorified pattern, a 
 piece of prettily woven tapestry, probably talked un- 
 diluted rot. The Irish Theatre movement, which was 
 intimately Individualist in the national sense, was all to 
 the good. Rivalry and emulation between nations in 
 these spheres bring out the best work, it being always 
 left to the artist to find the highest expression for the 
 individuality of a nation. But I am all against Indi- 
 vidualism in politics. It is simply Darwinism, the cult 
 of the fittest, the struggle for survival, the weaker going 
 to the wall and the poor to blazes : Eugenics, Niet- 
 zsche's superman, Benthamism, Anarchism, you know, 
 and all that. Now, all that is very well for animals ; but 
 Christ, among others who have apparently detected the 
 difference, knew better for men. Besides, Individu- 
 alism was the cult of the nineteenth century, the most 
 horrible period known to history. The only good 
 thing about the nineteenth century was its abrupt con- 
 clusion, and that was due, not to it, but to the calendar. 
 An Individualism of calendars inspiring thought ! I 
 shall go to bed on that. Anyhow, you had better let 
 Pramp join this club of his. That's the only way to 
 make him sick of it." 
 
 222
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 6 . ' 
 
 The Ephemeral Club was founded by a number of 
 people, who were sufficiently sceptical with regard to 
 their own convictions to admit that they would prob- 
 ably change them. It will be inferred therefore that it 
 was mainly a club of young people. Just at this time 
 most of them maintained an attitude of dyspeptic 
 hostility to the war, were animated by a contempt for 
 patriotism, and professed a vague belief in interna- 
 tionalism, the class war and revolution. They realized, 
 however, that in a few years, unless they were to regard 
 themselves as exempt from the frailties of human men- 
 tality, they would probably subside into Clapham and 
 maintain the Church, the State, marriage and an 
 allotment. 
 
 On principle they were Revolutionaries ; just as on 
 principle they were Pacifists ; but the contradiction of 
 creed was more apparent than real. The revolution 
 was a matter of theory, whereas the war was a matter of 
 fact ; were the former ever to materialize, it would be 
 found that the barricade was as abhorrent to them as the 
 barracks. Meanwhile, however, the revolution con- 
 siderately enough delayed itself and might be provoked 
 with impunity. And so the Ephemeralists spent their 
 time in political provocation, hanging on to the parlour 
 fringes of revolution and poking a fire which they 
 devoutly hoped would never burst into flames. As a 
 safeguard in case of unpleasant eventualities they 
 maintained a persistently open mind, and clung with 
 noble tenacity to their right to change their opinions 
 as often as they pleased. It was to mark this recep- 
 tivity to ideas that they called their club the Ephe- 
 meral Club, and it was expected of all of its members 
 
 223
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 that their minds should be moving staircases, so that no 
 member would ever know of another from day to day 
 on which step he or she would be. This characteristic 
 would, it was hoped, preclude undue dogmatism and 
 would at least invest the discussions of the club with the 
 important attribute of surprise. 
 
 The people who joined were certainly surprising. 
 They included most of those waifs and strays of the intel- 
 ligentsia who had resolutely refused to participate in the 
 war, had determined to ignore it as much as it would 
 let them, and were consequently out of work or doing 
 work of national importance as conscientious objectors. 
 
 There was a classical don who worked in a bakery, a 
 journalist who spent his days in a railway goods yard, 
 and numbers of writers, artists and clerks who for the 
 first time in their lives came into daily contact with the 
 land, and devoted their high and varied attainments to 
 the nurture of cabbages. 
 
 Their womenfolk, usually in a state of suppressed and 
 simmering exasperation, which not even the concession 
 of the vote had allayed, were mostly inappropriately 
 employed in business offices, where the necessity of 
 keeping quiet about their convictions and their hus- 
 bands by day, sent them indignantly to the club to let 
 off revolutionary steam by night. There were also a 
 number of women writers who, under the name of 
 novels, had produced autobiographies or diaries of their 
 emotional states, in which their passions, private affairs 
 and ideas were displayed in the shop window for the 
 inspection of the public at a maximum fee of six 
 shillings. 
 
 A few quite eminent though unpopular men joined 
 the club at the outset : Pacifist politicians, writers and 
 publishers of boob hostile to the war, members of the 
 
 224
 
 U.D.C. and well-known Russian revolutionaries. These 
 being the elite, speedily found the place overcrowded 
 for them by the numbers of the unknown, anxious to 
 claim acquaintance with the great ; so that it came to 
 be said of the club that it was a place where the herd 
 went to meet the knuts, and from which the knuts 
 stayed away to avoid meeting the herd. 
 
 Finally there was an amorphous body of artistic riff- 
 raff, which is the best London can do in the way of 
 Bohemians : young men with long hair curling on to 
 their shoulders, young women with short hair cropped 
 close over their ears, those whose sex was indeterminate 
 both as to costume and voice and those who were 
 neither men nor women but Slade. 
 
 The relationships, intimacies and consequent habi- 
 tats of these people changed with a kaleidoscopic 
 rapidity with which even the Secretary, whose business 
 it was to keep in touch with the addresses of the mem- 
 bers, could not cope. The couples were shuffled and 
 reshuffled like a pack of cards, and every time you 
 entered the smoking-room you found there had been 
 a new deal. 
 
 The rapidity of these changes was mainly instigated 
 by the women ; the men were chiefly responsible for 
 their reach and scope. Many of the men, while hold- 
 ing that love should be free and communal, regarded 
 friendship with their own sex as an intimate and per- 
 manent possession, a piece of private property, to the 
 sacred laws of which women must bow. Greater love 
 than this hath no man, that he should lay down his 
 wife for his friend, and many were ready, aye, eager to 
 make this sacrifice on the altar of friendship, on terms of 
 exchange in kind if it might be, but if not, ungrudg- 
 ingly as friends should. 
 
 225 p
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 It was found, alas, only too often that the women 
 were inconsiderate enough to object to these sacrifices, 
 and the complications arising from the woman's absurd 
 demand that she should love before she gave herself, 
 with the resultant shattering of many pretty schemes 
 concocted in male smoking-rooms for a distribution of 
 the female members of the club among the male, pro- 
 vided diverting matter for those interested in observing 
 the habits of the intelligentsia. 
 
 The club rapidly delegated itself into small sections 
 for the discussion of interesting or intimate topics, in 
 which it was felt that truth might more readily be 
 revealed by the give and take of the Socratic method 
 than by the rhetoric of the full-dress debate. A section 
 discussed international politics, another sexual psycho- 
 logy, another the education of parents, another the 
 organization of Trade Unions. 
 
 Every week, however, a night was set aside for a 
 general discussion, in which the whole club partici- 
 pated. Then the intelligentsia could at last hear the 
 lectures they wished to hear, lectures in which they got 
 the stark truth about Russia, or Ireland, or the Press, or 
 whatever the special grievance of the moment happened 
 to be, without fear or prejudice, and naturally without 
 bias. 
 
 For the rest, the place was comfortably but not lux- 
 uriously furnished ; all the more advanced periodicals 
 were available, and women could smoke in all the 
 rooms. A dining-room was provided in which cheap 
 but homely meals could be obtained, the cooking, 
 though simple, being uniformly good. 
 
 From the very first the influence of the women at 
 the club was predominant. In numbers alone they sur- 
 passed the men, whose ranks were sadly depleted by the 
 
 226
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 prisons, the bakeries and the farms on which perforce 
 they spent all or most of their time. 
 
 May Bowsher, the woman's Trade Union organizer, 
 was one of the most prominent ; Miss Bright, who 
 wrote witty articles in Labour papers wherein bright 
 little Annies confuted Jingo uncles, successful pro- 
 fiteers and patriotic canvassers, also found time to 
 favour the club meetings with her superfluous epigrams. 
 
 These women, who had for years given their brains 
 and energy to leading the women's movement to vic- 
 tory and the vote, found the wind somewhat taken 
 out of their sails by the embarrassing concession which 
 had at last given the vote to them. Like many people 
 who concentrate on a single object, they found that 
 success had laid waste their interests and devastated 
 their lives, or had at least destroyed their justification 
 for living. As a consequence their talents were 
 diverted to vague and discussive assaults upon the war, 
 upon the men who made it in particular, and thence 
 upon men in general. 
 
 7 
 
 This was the assembly into which Pramp, with the 
 secret connivance of his father, was duly admitted, and 
 he had enjoyed the privileges of membership for some 
 months, when Mrs. Pramp took her great decision. 
 This decision was nothing less than to go to London, 
 pay a surprise visit to the club, and see for herself 
 whether it was a suitable body for her young son to 
 belong to. 
 
 His conversation of late had given her cause for in- 
 creasing disquietude. He rarely put in an appearance 
 at Patching, and poor Mrs. Pramp did not know 
 whether to be the more relieved or hurt at his long 
 
 227
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 absences. When he did come he either refused to talk, 
 which was bad enough, or he said disconcerting things, 
 which was worse. 
 
 " That boy is a great disappointment to me," she 
 remarked to Nancy. " It doesn't matter what you do 
 for him, he's always the same, selfish and ungracious. 
 He sneers at everything that is good, sometimes even at 
 sacred things, and thinks he knows better than his 
 father and mother, and even the dear vicar." 
 
 " Yes," sympathized Nancy, " he's very difficult, I'm 
 sure ; and when he does talk you never know what he is 
 going to say next. Most unusual I call it." 
 
 " I don't know what has put such things in his head," 
 said Ida. " I'm sure he doesn't get it from me. It 
 must be those Socialists he goes with. I never did 
 approve of them and I never shall. Professional grum- 
 blers I call them ! " 
 
 But Mrs. Pramp was sufficiently open-minded not to 
 pass a final judgment of disapprobation until she had 
 good grounds to justify it. She would suspend judg- 
 ment for the time and go and see for herself what this 
 club was like. So, bravely sacrificing her feelings to her 
 son's interests, she travelled up to town, arrived at the 
 club at about half-past eight in the evening, and asked 
 for Arthur. 
 
 Arthur, it seemed, was not in, but might be expected 
 later ; so Mrs. Pramp went boldly into the lounge to 
 take stock of the place, and wait for him. 
 
 Round the chief fireplace a group of men and women 
 was sitting, talking and discussing together in loud 
 voices. Mrs. Pramp could not have helped hearing 
 even if she had wished. But she did not wish. She 
 was one of those people for whom other people's letters 
 and other people's conversation had an irresistible fas- 
 
 228
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 cination. She. read the former and listened to the latter 
 whenever she could on principle, and because an un- 
 expected streak of humility in her character made her 
 believe that whatever was not meant for her must 
 inevitably and for that very reason be fascinating or 
 intriguing, or wickedly palpitating with life and 
 excitement, 
 
 Beside, in this case she was interested in the cut and 
 texture of the women's clothes. They wore thick 
 brown stockings, and shoes whose heels were not appre- 
 ciably higher than those of a man. A business-like 
 skirt and blouse, or in some cases a homogeneous gar- 
 ment of a plain and sober stuff stretching from the neck 
 to the ankles failed to disguise the total absence of 
 corsets. Nowhere was there any attempt to turn a bad 
 figure into a good one, or under the appearance of 
 disguising, to reveal in a salient form those portions of 
 the figure which did happen to be presentable. Mrs. 
 Pramp thought she had never seen anything so 
 unfashionable. 
 
 The first speaker to attract her attention was Miss 
 Bowsher. She was a bright, eager-looking little 
 woman, with a hooked nose and beady brown eyes. 
 She had a voice whose pleasantness not even twenty 
 years of public speaking had been able wholly to de- 
 stroy, and an unusually good figure. Altogether she 
 reminded one of a bird, and she was talking, as usual, 
 about the future of her sex. 
 
 She was urging the importance of women retaining 
 the various war duties they had taken up. Of course 
 women must stay in Government offices ; of course 
 they must remain on the buses and the tubes. Why 
 should they give up the comparatively lucrative jobs 
 they had obtained in factories to go back to the 
 
 229
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 drudgery of housework, or the servility of domestic 
 service ? 
 
 " I think that women for the first time in their history 
 have begun only begun, mind you to come into their 
 own, and they are not going to give it up in a hurry." 
 
 It was Anstruther, the eminent publicist, who took 
 up a comparatively reactionary line. 
 
 " Women," he said, " should return to their normal 
 sphere, the home. I don't for a moment suggest that 
 compulsion should be applied. I simply think, as a 
 question of psychology, that women are not naturally 
 fitted for industry and the professions. Give women a 
 free choice and you'll find that the vast majority will 
 prefer looking after their husbands, their children and 
 their homes to any other occupation." 
 
 " How do you explain the insurgence of women that 
 lay behind the suffragette movement ? " said Miss 
 Bright. " That showed that women were not content 
 to go on with the time-honoured occupations of making 
 beds, laying the table and washing up. 
 
 " Women for the last fifty years have been like 
 children who wish for the moon only because they can't 
 have it. The child presented with the moon would 
 quickly find itself bored to tears with the moon, even if 
 no worse fate befell him. So women only clamoured to 
 be bishops, priests, lawyers and politicians because 
 they were arbitrarily forbidden these things. Give 
 them the right, and I believe they would be the last to 
 take advantage of it ; remove the barrier, and they 
 would be the last to pass through. They would soon 
 find that the fire of public life burnt their fingers and 
 retire contentedly to their pots and pans. Unlock the 
 door and the prisoner is never so anxious to escape, 
 especially if it is her own house door. So I would 
 
 230
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 remove all artificial barriers that prevent women 
 from preaching, pleading and politicianizing, not be- 
 cause I believe they are fit to do these things, but 
 because I believe they are not ; but I also believe that 
 the only way to convince them of this is to let them 
 try for themselves." 
 
 " This is sheer reaction," put in old Peabody, who 
 had persistently hung on to the skirts of every advanced 
 movement that had ever been known. " You assume, 
 I suppose, that woman is fundamentally inferior to man, 
 that she is fundamentally incapable of performing the 
 various functions men have hitherto arrogated to 
 themselves." 
 
 " It isn't a question of inferiority or superiority," 
 said Anstruther. " It's simply that woman is funda- 
 mentally different. I don't care whether she was the 
 same once and you say that her difference is due to cen- 
 turies of bad education and segregation. That doesn't 
 alter the fact that she is different now. Of course all 
 generalizations about women are more or less absurd, 
 and are more or less as true both as their opposites and 
 as the same generalizations about men, but this much, 
 at least, seems certain : women are more conservative 
 and uniform among themselves than men are ; they are 
 less versatile, exhibiting a far smaller degree of variabil- 
 ity for good or ill. Women, for instance, are not 
 wozzlers." 
 
 " What on earth's that ? " said Eric, who had for 
 once been patiently listening. 
 
 " A ' wozzler ' is a person who spends his days wear- 
 ing out the knees of his breeches praying, and his nights 
 wearing out the seat of his breeches backsliding." 
 
 " Silly ass ! " said Eric. 
 
 " Women are not wozzlers intellectually, just as they 
 
 231
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 are not wozzlers morally. Women do not rise to the 
 heights just as they do not sink to the depths of men. 
 There are no women of genius except unrepresentative 
 women, but then no woman could perpetrate the sillier 
 modern poetry." 
 
 " And what does all this come 'to ? " said Peabody. 
 " Even if women are more conservative and less vari- 
 able, which I deny, why should, they stay at home ? 
 Does it seem right and just to you that men should 
 for ever confine women to the horizon of the kitchen ? 
 Must a woman spend all her life beating out her soul 
 against the scullery sink ? " a favourite cliche this of 
 old Peabody's which had never failed to move even the 
 most hostile meeting. 
 
 " The point is that women's lack of versatility, their 
 lack of variability as a sex means that whereas men have 
 a thousand and one occupations, none of which are 
 more particularly a man's than any other, woman has 
 only one occupation which can be specified as particu- 
 larly a woman's and which almost every woman is at 
 heart contented to perform, namely, the occupation of 
 looking after a man and bearing his children." 
 
 '" Fiddlesticks," said Miss Bowsher. 
 
 " Sour grapes," murmured Eric a propos of the 
 Bowsher's ejaculation. 
 
 " But is it fiddlesticks ? " said Anstruther. " How 
 many women has one seen you must be as familiar 
 with the phenomenon as I am young, promising Uni- 
 versity women, who seem likely to make their mark in 
 science, in medicine or in art, giving up their careers, 
 their outside interests and all that they promise without 
 a moment's hesitation, directly the right man cornea 
 along and devoting themselves to him and to his 
 children for the rest of their days : subsiding, if you like, 
 
 232
 
 into household drudges ? It must be a phenomenon 
 which has withdrawn numberless promising young 
 recruits from the women's movement : a very thorn in 
 your flesh." 
 
 " Women in Government offices too ! " said Eric. 
 " They don't really care for the work. They are only 
 marking time till they get married, hundreds and 
 hundreds of 'em, half of whom spend their time in 
 making tea for the other half." 
 
 " That is a cheap gibe," said Peabody, " very stale 
 and quite untrue. The work women have put in 
 during the war has been wonderful, simply wonderful, 
 I tell you. I wouldn't have believed they had it in 
 'em." 
 
 " But there is more to it than that," broke in Eric, 
 disregarding Peabody's interruption. " Let us suppose 
 that all Miss Bowsher says is true ; that the main 
 feminist contentions, in so far as they assume the form 
 of prophecy, are correct as a forecast of woman's 
 place in the future, and that women will not, broadly 
 speaking, return to the domestic sphere. Don't you 
 see that such a development threatens with extinction 
 the women's movement itself ? " 
 
 " I am glad that I can't see that," said Miss Bright. 
 " The women's movement will go on gathering force 
 in the future as it has in the past." 
 
 " But consider the facts. As every one knows, there 
 already exists in this country a selective birth-rate 
 of a very remarkable kind. The very poor and, in 
 a lesser degree, the very rich multiply exceedingly. 
 Idle and imbecile women, unemployable men, with 
 no security, no stake in the country and no sense 
 of responsibility, feeling perhaps that they cannot 
 be much worse off than they are at present, and 
 
 233
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 being unable anyhow to afford preventatives, have 
 enormous families. The middle-classes, and more 
 especially the thinking portions of the middle-classes, 
 exercise rigid birth control, and are actually de- 
 creasing in numbers. They rarely have families of 
 more than two or three children. This is partly due 
 to the revolt of all educated women against being 
 treated as mere child-producing machines. But when, 
 as happens even more frequently, the woman is imbued 
 with feminism and advanced ideas the refusal to sub- 
 side into a maternal drudge is still more marked. 
 
 " The necessity for economy is in itself an important 
 deterrent. The desire to live one's own life operates 
 equally strongly. Where a woman has a life of her 
 own to lead, where she has outside interests and 
 pursuits, and the desire to earn an income of her own, 
 she will see in every child a hindrance to the time and 
 energy she requires for the development of her own 
 personality. Thus she will have one child, so as not 
 to miss the experience, and stop at that. Political 
 women are notoriously childless, and just in proportion 
 as a woman is gifted with more energy, initiative, fore- 
 sight and ambition than the average, in that degree 
 does she revolt against wasting her gifts on that which 
 the veriest little suburban doll or peasant wench can 
 accomplish as well or better than she can. Thus the 
 best elements among women tend to an automatic 
 sterilization of themselves. The mere fact that a 
 woman is a feminist is a predisposing factor against her 
 reproducing herself and consequently against her 
 reproducing her ideas. 
 
 " The upshot is that a time will come when the adher- 
 ents of feminism and the wider life for women become 
 so numerous that they will fail to keep up their num- 
 
 234
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 bers, through unwillingness or inability to bear children. 
 That climax is not reached as yet. At present the 
 advanced women's movement continues to draw recruits 
 from the children of mothers old-fashioned enough to 
 have them ; but this source of supply is not limitless, 
 and advanced women fail and will fail increasingly from 
 the causes I have suggested to keep up their numbers 
 from their own offspring. This is the Nemesis that 
 waits on the women's movements, automatic extinc- 
 tion from their own excess of zeal." 
 
 " Very closely reasoned," said Miss Bright, " but I 
 am not yet convinced that careers for women are incom- 
 patible with child-bearing." 
 
 " Careers in industry certainly are, as any statistics 
 of infant mortality among factory women will show. 
 Careers for women in clerical and sedentary occupations 
 may not be dogged with the same fate, but the number 
 of women following them are not sufficient to affect the 
 argument." 
 
 " Supposing the conclusion true, should it deter us 
 from developing ourselves as we see fit ? " 
 
 " Perhaps not, but that raises a different point. And 
 yet, although on the ground that life on the whole is not 
 worth living, one may contemplate with equanimity the 
 extinction of the race through the failure of its members 
 to bear sufficient children, I must say I shrink from a 
 prospect in which the least valuable elements of the 
 community perpetuate themselves and increase, while 
 the more valuable die out ; that is a reversion to bar- 
 barism or something like it." 
 
 " Then you do hold that advanced women are valu- 
 able, more valuable than the old-fashioned child-bearing 
 machine ? " said Miss Bowsher. " Surely there is a 
 flaw somewhere. If you deprecate the woman who 
 
 235
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 poaches on masculine preserves, why deplore her 
 extinction ? " 
 
 " You are being too logical for me," said Eric. " I 
 must confine myself to pointing out the possibility of 
 extinction without approving or disapproving." 
 
 " This is all rotten bad biology," said old Peabody, 
 " and what's more, it's quite unfair to the wonderful 
 things women have done. I tell you that the things 
 women have done during the war have been wonderful, 
 simply wonderful. Nobody could have believed it, I 
 tell you. And now they've made such a success at it, 
 why shouldn't they keep on at it ? Eh ? Now I believe 
 in every woman going out into the world and doing 
 whatever work nature fitted her for." 
 
 " Agreed, agreed," said Eric patiently. " We all 
 agree that women, like everybody else, should do what 
 they are most fitted for. The only question is, what are 
 they most fitted for ? Now we say that a woman is 
 most fitted for looking after her husband and her chil- 
 dren, padding the background of his life so to speak. 
 That is the only thing most women are fitted for." 
 
 "But how can you say anything so ridiculous, Mr. 
 Ashley ? " said Miss Bright. " Look at the enormous 
 success of women in the professions she has adopted, 
 where she competes with men on equal terms." 
 
 " I fail to see it. Women have made a success of two 
 professions, medicine and nursing, and they make good 
 doctors and good nurses simply because the main part 
 of the work consists in looking after men and children. 
 The majority of patients are men and children, because 
 there are more men and children in the world than 
 women. 
 
 " And then, you know," pursued Eric, warming to his 
 favourite topic, on which we have already heard him 
 
 236
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 at some length, " women are the guardians of morality, 
 the upholders of the family system. Why ? Because 
 they are more moral than men ? Not a bit of it ! It is 
 because the business of being a wife is the only profession 
 open to them. And they oppose any attempt to sub- 
 vert the family, not only on the economic ground that 
 it would undermine their means of livelihood, but 
 because as guardians of the continuance of the race, 
 they can best fulfil their function by possessing one man 
 and one man only. Now men as a rule are different. In 
 their heart of hearts, they want a number of women, 
 and they want to avoid being possessed by any of them. 
 That is God's greatest practical joke. He made men 
 polygamous and women monogamous ; hence arise 
 troubles innumerable." 
 
 " It may once have been true," said Miss Bowsher 
 indignantly, " that a woman's only profession was that 
 of being a wife and mother, but it isn't true to-day ; and 
 when women get as good opportunities for education as 
 men, they will be independent of this terrible necessity 
 of marrying for economic reasons. That is one more 
 reason for freeing them from the tyranny man has 
 enforced on them." 
 
 " You are right, Miss Bowsher," said Eric gravely. 
 " Of course, there are other professions open to a woman, 
 at least there is one other profession, she may become a 
 prostitute, but the difference is not very great. The 
 prostitute sells her body to a number of men to keep 
 her freedom, the married woman sells her freedom to 
 one man to keep her body. Each of them is resolutely 
 opposed to any attempt to subvert morality by the 
 recognition and condonation of sexual intercourse out- 
 side the marriage tie. The enthusiastic amateur in love, 
 the woman who loves for the sake of love and not for 
 
 237
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 money or livelihood, is a menace to both and is abhorred 
 by both. Why ? For economic reasons again. The 
 enthusiastic amateur blacklegs both the women's Trade 
 Unions, the Trade Union of wives and the Trade Union 
 of prostitutes.'* 
 
 " I can't have you talking like that, Mr. Ashley : it is 
 not that I think it immoral, but it's so stupid. Your 
 mother . . ." But at this point the conversation was 
 interrupted. A large fashionably dressed woman, who 
 had been sitting just behind the circle by the fire, was 
 observed to get up suddenly and emphatically. For a 
 moment she glared at the group of talkers with sombre 
 fury. Then " You ought to be ashamed of yourselves ! " 
 she exclaimed, and with a snort of indignation walked 
 majestically from the room. 
 
 Mrs. Pramp had finally made up her mind about the 
 Ephemeral Club. 
 
 " 8 
 
 Mrs. Pramp returned to Patching with feelings of 
 horror. She believed in her heart that she had really 
 been shocked, and though it would not have squared 
 with the role she wished to assume of a modern woman 
 of the world to admit the existence of such a feeling, it 
 expressed itself in an air of unusual restraint which made 
 her reticent about her experiences at the club. It was 
 as though she wished to convey the impression that her 
 sentiments were too deep for expression, her knowledge 
 too painful to be communicated. Only she affirmed as 
 a result of her experience that Arthur must not on any 
 account be allowed to become a member of that club : 
 that if he were already a member, his membership must 
 be immediately terminated ; that he must give a solemn 
 promise never to go near the place again ; and that if 
 
 238
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 he refused to do any of these things, he must be 
 denounced, denied access to the paternal roof, deprived 
 of the paternal allowance, and eliminated from the 
 paternal will. 
 
 These sentiments were conveyed with an air of quiet 
 determination to Mr. Pramp. They were also repeated 
 to each of the various friends and relatives of the family 
 who visited Patching, and received their unqualified 
 assent. They felt that they were personally involved. 
 A member of such a society as Ida hinted at must at the 
 best be rendered unfit for the society of gentlewomen : 
 at the worst he might become notorious, get involved 
 with a low woman, or make speeches against religion in 
 Hyde Park. One never knew where that sprt of thing 
 might lead. Only Mr. Pramp, whose opinion in virtue 
 of his control of the purse was of paramount importance, 
 remained unexpectedly unperturbed, and it became 
 a matter of moment to the rest of the family to make 
 him see things as they did. His prohibition was, in fact, 
 essential : even if the corruption of Arthur had already 
 proceeded to the point of ignoring the authority of a 
 parent and it seemed only too probable that it had 
 he could not ignore his bank balance. Arthur had no 
 settled profession as yet the publishing house had been 
 vacated for war work he showed, in fact, no inclination 
 to adopt one, and he could not live without his father's 
 support. 
 
 It was resolved therefore by the various aunts, uncles 
 and others, who felt that the honour of the family was 
 involved, to make a mass assault on Mr. Pramp, and to 
 convince him by the sheer weight of argument of his 
 duty to his son. 
 
 For some days there was a gradual gathering of the 
 Pramp clan at Patching. Only Christmas and some- 
 
 239
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 thing unpleasant had this power of bringing the family 
 together, and in their hearts they preferred it to be 
 something unpleasant. It gave them more to talk about. 
 Nancy was there, of course, ready to be shocked or 
 sympathetic with full lungs, as the occasion required. 
 Then there was Mr. Pramp's sister, Janet. She had 
 married a successful merchant who, coming to London 
 with a half -penny in his pocket in the obscurity of the 
 past, had by dint of successfully fleecing his fellows under 
 the name of business push and enterprise and the ban- 
 ner of a successful pill, amassed a fortune of some hun- 
 dred thousands. This his wife knew so little how to 
 spend that she had ruined both her figure and her com- 
 plexion in trying to live up to the challenge of her 
 income. Her horizon was circumscribed by motors, 
 yachts, lap-dogs, meringues and cosmetics. Of these 
 last she was fabulously acquisitive, and was ever trying 
 the effect of new complexions. Her face had striven 
 after the ideal of the chameleon for so long, that it had 
 at last given way under the strain, and had now subsided 
 into a dirty grey tint, with ravines of darker shadow 
 between the rolls of fat. Still Janet struggled with it 
 womanfully, and on occasions made up in vividness what 
 she lacked in tone. The result was, at any rate, arrest- 
 ing, even if it conveyed an air of decadence. If you 
 had seen her in Leicester Square you would have 
 thought she had been ill-advised to leave the Strand. 
 
 The merchant, her husband, was considerate enough 
 to die at the age of fifty, and Janet, who now abhorred 
 anything to do with trade, and whose market value had 
 gone up as her complexion had declined, had chosen 
 another partner from among the learned professions. 
 
 She was now accompanied by her second husband, 
 George Mills. George was a barrister of wit and sub- 
 
 240
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 stance. His reputation for wit was partly, but not 
 wholly, founded on his famous repartee to Mr. Justice 
 Shanks. In prosecuting a certain workman for criminal 
 assault, Mr. Mills had ventured to remark that the man, 
 on leaving his public at half-past ten, immediately before 
 the incident for which he was indicted, was " as drunk 
 as a judge." Mr. Justice Shanks reprovecl him : " You 
 should not say ' as drunk as a judge ' in court : it implies 
 disrespect ; the common version of the phrase is * as 
 drunk as a lord.' ' " I accept the correction, my lord," 
 Mr. Mills had replied, and the remark was repeated in 
 anecdotal gatherings of the profession as a triumph of 
 legal wit. 
 
 Mr. Mills's substance was as undeniable as his wit. It 
 was testified to by the wardrobe of his wife. Moreover, 
 Janet was celebrated as a lavish entertainer in her beau- 
 tiful house at Hampstead. She had succeeded in creating 
 what has baffled so many London hostesses, a salon. It 
 had endured now for more than two seasons, and on the 
 fringe of the brilliant gatherings which graced her rooms 
 every other Thursday evening, George could be observed 
 refusing to be entrapped into argument or discourse on 
 any one topic, but coruscating fitfully over the surface 
 of many. He had no convictions and no subjects, or 
 rather, having ceased to hold any convictions or to work 
 at any subject, he could be at play with them all. He 
 regarded sincerity, however, as quite an innocent form 
 of self-indulgence, and found in earnest people his prin- 
 cipal recreation ; so he trailed after Janet into any 
 enthusiasm that happened to be uppermost at the 
 moment, and was as ready to protect the mind and 
 morals of Arthur as to finance the Church of England 
 Society for removing the veils from women in harems. 
 
 Ida's brother, James, was portly in figure and por- 
 
 241 Q
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 tentous in manner. Being unable to keep up with the 
 world, he revenged himself by complaining that he 
 did not know what it was coming to. He maintained 
 an uncompromising hostility to the young, whom he 
 could not understand, and did not very much mind 
 whether Arthur was heading for Heaven or Hell so 
 long as he could put a spoke in his wheel and stop him 
 getting there. 
 
 The assembled relatives made a frontal attack upon 
 Mr. Pramp as he sat on the veranda after lunch. The 
 veranda commanded a magnificent view to the south 
 over the Surrey weald, and on this particular afternoon 
 in early October was flooded with golden sunlight. 
 The veranda gave on to a terrace bounded by a fence, 
 on the other side of which green meadows, dotted with 
 fine old trees, stretched to a copse which blazed with 
 the full richness of October colouring. The distance 
 was merged in a purple haze. It was a lovely day, and 
 the prospect was a delightful and soothing one for a 
 retired Indian civilian who had just partaken of a par- 
 ticularly good curry. So very English and all that ! 
 
 And yet the time was not well chosen. It was the 
 dead of the afternoon ; it was just too late to be after 
 lunch and just too early to be before tea : it was, in fact, 
 three o'clock : the time when the vitality of the man 
 who has lunched well is at its lowest ebb. If he isn't 
 asleep he ought to be. Mr. Pramp was not asleep, but 
 he was trying to achieve that blissful state as hard as he 
 could, and the sight of all these middle-aged, prosperous, 
 energetic-looking people coming on to the veranda just 
 at this time made him feel very cross. He expected 
 more sense, or at any rate more forbearance, from the 
 old vicar who came with them. But, then, the vicar 
 had done his best to keep the deputation away, and had 
 
 242
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 been overruled. He now accompanied them, partly to 
 see the fun, and partly to pour as much oil on the 
 troubled waters as he could. 
 
 Janet, as a blood relative of Mr. Pramp, was deputed 
 to state the case for the family : she had in fact insisted 
 on doing so. It was a forcible though somewhat inco- 
 herent statement. They had come to speak to him on 
 a matter touching Arthur's welfare. They did not wish 
 to interfere between father and son, a sacred relation- 
 ship, but they could not help thinking that he must be 
 unaware of certain happenings to which they regarded 
 it as imperative, in the interests of the family as well as 
 of Arthur himself, to draw his attention. Augustus had 
 been so long out of touch with the world, that he was 
 perhaps unaware of the dangers it contained for the 
 young, dangers which she could assure him had multi- 
 plied terribly since his time. His goodness of heart too 
 was apt to mislead him, to make him unduly indulgent, 
 and unable to credit the wickedness and weakness of 
 others. It behoved others therefore to let him have 
 the benefit of their greater and more up-to-date experi- 
 ence of the world. 
 
 Here Uncle George interrupted the speaker with the 
 remark that it was the business of the wise to repair the 
 harm done by the good. 
 
 Mr. Pramp begged the speaker to be more specific. 
 What did she want ? 
 
 It was about Arthur, she said. They thought per- 
 haps that he did not know where the boy was drifting. 
 His political opinions were disgraceful, and though he 
 was used to the society of gentlemen and had been 
 brought up among nice people, he consorted with low 
 Radicals. Just at present he wanted to join, perhaps 
 had even joined already, a low club in London which was 
 
 243
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 run by people of this sort. Ida had been up to see the 
 club and had heard some really dreadful things there. 
 Nobody minded people doing wrong occasionally if they 
 repented afterwards, but these people seemed to make 
 a principle of wrongness and to glorify it. Ida was sure 
 they were horrid people and could only do Arthur harm. 
 If he wasn't wise enough to choose wise friends for 
 himself, they must choose for him. He must be 
 protected against himself. It would never do for 
 the family if Arthur became identified with Atheists 
 and Socialists, for that was really what these people 
 were : no, it would certainly never do, especially with 
 James standing for Parliament at the next election ! ! 
 
 Arthur would probably marry one of these women, or 
 worse still, live with her without marrying, in a Garden 
 Suburb. They knew the kind of thing, sandals and 
 djibbahs, a mob of babies, troubles over the drains and 
 all that. 
 
 Mr. Pramp remarked that the Hampstead Garden 
 Suburb, which he had himself visited, seemed an excel- 
 lent place to live in, and that everybody there looked 
 very healthy. The children too were happy. 
 
 " All that Golders is not green," said Uncle George 
 darkly. 
 
 " I wish, George, that you wouldn't interrupt with 
 your irrelevant remarks," said his wife. " They may 
 be very witty, but wit should be confined to its proper 
 sphere. This isn't a law court." 
 
 " No, my dear, it's a solemn family discussion." 
 
 " Well, then, keep your funny remarks for the courts, 
 which are the proper place for them. This is a serious 
 affair, and I wouldn't have my brother think that we 
 were not serious when we come to speak to him about 
 the welfare of his son. Now, I have only one more 
 
 244
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 thing to say, and that is this : this is an age of self- 
 indulgence, bodily and mental ; there is license in 
 morals and license in ideas ; there is no respect for 
 authority, no deference to experience, no obedience to 
 one's elders. Arthur has caught the spirit of his age ; 
 nothing is sacred to him : he won't go to church, he 
 neglects his people, and I tell you frankly, I suspect his 
 patriotism. He said some very queer things about the 
 war last time I saw him. Now, unless you take a 
 strong line with him, we shall have him disgracing the 
 family by going to prison for some crotchet he is 
 pleased to call his opinions, or running off with a chorus 
 girl, or a little Jewess from Stepney, before we know 
 where we are. We think, therefore, in the interests of 
 the family, that the time has come to take a stand. In 
 the first place, I expect you allow him too much money. 
 A young man with money in his pocket in London runs 
 into all sorts of dangers, and the more he has the more 
 he is likely to fall into debt." 
 
 " Appetite grows with the income it feeds on," 
 interjected George. 
 
 " I wish, dear, you would be quiet until I've done. 
 Curtail his allowance, then, and demand a strict 
 account of how he spends it. In the second place, 
 forbid him to join this club. If he persists, cut off 
 supplies. There is nothing else to be done. You have 
 the power, and you must exercise it ruthlessly in the 
 interests of the family name and of Arthur himself. 
 What is the use of being strong if you can't impose 
 your will ? " 
 
 " One touch of Nietzsche makes the whole world 
 sin," said the irrepressible George, apparently to round 
 off the eloquence of his wife. Janet, who had risen to 
 her feet in the vehemence of her conviction, sat down. 
 
 245
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Mr. Pramp looked round blinking in the afternoon 
 sunlight. " Has anybody else any advice to give me 
 as to how I should treat my son ? " Nobody appar- 
 ently had anything to say. James moved uneasily in 
 his seat, and mumbled something about " young 
 whipper-snapper," but failed to follow it up, and the 
 others maintained a complacent silence, conscious of 
 the Tightness of their cause and the disinterestedness 
 of their motives. 
 
 Mr. Pramp said that he quite understood their point 
 of view. Arthur must be protected against his own 
 ideas : they might lead him astray. And he, Mr. 
 Pramp, disagreed utterly. As he said, he quite under- 
 stood them ; it was what he would have expected of 
 them. He was certain that the whole affair had been 
 got up by the women Janet had done all the talking 
 and it was like women to want to interfere with other 
 people. Women were only interested in personalities ; 
 that was why they loved gossip and revelled in scandal. 
 They were incapable of any impersonal interests ; they 
 could never attain to an objective attitude towards life. 
 Knowledge, for instance, for its own sake, was meaning- 
 less to them ; so was beauty. Schopenhauer had 
 noticed long ago that women had no aesthetic sense : 
 Schopenhauer had watched them at a concert. But 
 they were clever at assuming a passable imitation of an 
 aesthetic sense, both because men liked them to look 
 pretty and because the ability to play the " Moonlight 
 Sonata " and to appreciate the pictures of Roger Fry, 
 endeared them to the cultured male, who preferred, 
 when young, to mate with apparently cultured women. 
 This predilection for cultured women was mere senti- 
 ment on the man's part : when a man grew older he 
 wanted physically healthy women with no pretence of 
 
 246
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CL-UB 
 
 culture about them. All the best marriages had been 
 marriages between intellectual men and beautiful 
 women with the minds of guinea-pigs. After all, a 
 man didn't want to talk to his wife : it was only 
 because nowadays he made the mistake of trying to, 
 that modern marriages were usually disastrous. 
 
 It was the same with learning. Women distrusted 
 learning : they suspected the learned man because he 
 was interested in something impersonal for its own 
 sake, something which didn't relate to them. It 
 diminished their hold over him. But because of this 
 peculiar male habit of wanting to know, women, being 
 adaptable creatures where men were concerned, had 
 exfoliated a certain aptitude for learning which they 
 pursued vigorously enough until they had made it 
 achieve its object of capturing a man for them. Then 
 their text-books went into the fire, they forgot to be 
 seen reading poetry, and they returned to their old 
 game of interfering with other people. Women could 
 assume any disguise that was required of them, even a 
 knowledge of mathematics, for the purpose of sex. 
 When the purpose was achieved the disguise was cast 
 aside, and . . . 
 
 " My dear," said Ida, " aren't you rather wander- 
 ing F We came to speak to you about Arthur, and it 
 isn't only we women. George and James both think 
 as we do." 
 
 Mr. Pramp, however, not at all put out by the 
 interruption, went on with his discourse. 
 
 " Ah yes, Arthur ! That reminds me. Now, why 
 do you women want to interfere with Arthur ? First, 
 because, being women, you can't abide his having 
 intellectual freedom. You feel vaguely that Arthur 
 has found in this Socialism of his something bigger than 
 
 247
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 himself, something that he can work for and lose him- 
 self in, something that will emancipate him from the 
 petty world of personal relationships in which you 
 excel. I have watched Arthur closely lately ; yes, I 
 have watched him when you have thought me only 
 blinking my old eyes preparatory to the afternoon 
 slumber that God is good enough to send me on top of 
 an adequate luncheon. Slumber after luncheon, you 
 understand ; very important. Ought not to be 
 missed ! What was I saying ? Ah yes, Arthur. I 
 believe Arthur is really doing this from disinterested 
 motives ; he wants to help the people, he wants to 
 raise them and educate them, and he wants to diminish 
 the sum total of injustice in the world. Odd ideas for 
 a young man to have, but there you are, he has them ! 
 I think he's wrong ; I don't believe it is to be done that 
 way, but then, I'm a disillusioned old man who doesn't 
 believe, and doesn't want to believe, anything could 
 be done, who doesn't even believe that if it could be 
 done it would be worth doing. But Arthur has youth 
 and enthusiasm ; he sees our class for what it is, and I 
 am inclined to agree with him. We have so long 
 regarded ourselves as the centre of the universe, we 
 governing British classes, that we have come to believe 
 that the rest of the universe is only there to put us in 
 the centre. Arthur sees other uses for the rest of the 
 universe, and he is a little doubtful about the propriety 
 of having people like us as its navel. I expect he wants 
 us to go, and to put a lot of workmen in our place. 
 There I don't agree with him ; I doubt if workmen 
 would be any better, and at first they would be a lot 
 worse. But all this means something to Arthur ; it's 
 a real objective interest to him, and you women hate it 
 because, being incapable of such an interest yourselves, 
 
 248
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 /ou realize that it undermines your influence over those 
 that pursue it. In their souls women always hate 
 artists and visionaries, scholars and even politicians, 
 because they have all got something in life which they 
 value for its own sake. A woman has only her hold 
 over a man, and when a man hitches his wagon to a 
 star, he is inclined to slip the strings of her apron. 
 
 " Whether Arthur is right or not in his odd views 
 doesn't concern you ; whether they make him happy 
 or not, which is what matters to me, and I think they 
 do (strongly held opinions always make a man happy), 
 doesn't concern you. What does concern you is that 
 they make him independent of you, and that's what 
 you can't stand. It isn't the Socialism or the 
 Anarchism or whatever it is you mind ; it's the fact 
 of his taking anything except love or money-making 
 seriously. If he became a hermit, a martyr, an artist, 
 a temperance reformer, a monk, or an ascetic, you 
 would object just as strongly, and trump up just as 
 imposing arguments for your objection. And, in the 
 second place " But here Uncle James broke in : 
 
 " This unwarranted attack upon the ladies, Pramp, 
 is not only beside the point, it is insulting. I I won't 
 listen to it. I came here in the family interest to save 
 the family name ; but if you can't take the matter 
 seriously, I must leave the house." 
 
 " I assure you, my dear James, I am perfectly 
 serious ; but don't let that deter you if you wish to 
 relieve us of your company. In the second place, as 
 I was saying, the women object to Arthur because they 
 think there is something morally shocking about 
 advanced views, and they begin to bristle all over like 
 a lot of porcupines with outraged feelings. Now, I've 
 no objection to people being shocked. To feel shocked 
 
 249
 
 THE HIGHB ROWS 
 
 Is quite a harmless form of self-indulgence. But they 
 should not pretend that there is anything noble or 
 distinguished about it, or that the feeling is prompted 
 by a desire to s*ve the family name. The family name 
 ought to be able to look after itself by this time : we 
 gave it practice enough in our young days, and I am 
 sure Arthur won't prevail against it when all we could 
 do left it intact. But the fact of the matter is you are 
 getting old, and you don't like to think of Arthur 
 enjoying himself in ways which are no longer open to 
 you. So you adopt a ' dog in the manger ' attitude 
 and tell him he really must not. That's what your 
 morality is, a calling of sour grapes at pleasures we are 
 getting too old to enjoy ; and as morality is main- 
 tained by the old for the benefit of the young, most 
 pleasures that are worth having get called immoral ; 
 feeding, sleeping, gossiping, plotting, on the other 
 hand, which are the chief indulgences of the old, pass 
 unchallenged. The young, you see, are too busy 
 enjoying themselves, whether we like it or not, to 
 bother their heads about whether what we do is moral, 
 or whether it isn't. Nobody does bother his head 
 about morals until he is too old for enjoyment, or 
 rather, old enough to find his chief enjoyment in 
 blaming others for their enjoyments. We all like 
 blaming; it's fundamental in us, especially if we are 
 females ; and, as we always have to invent some kind 
 of reasons for our censure, we set our wits to work to 
 produce arguments to justify our own disagreeableness. 
 The result is called morality ; but it is only a rationali- 
 zation of the impulse to blame. 
 
 " Now, I would like to blame Arthur. I am horribly 
 envious when I think of the jolly little affairs he is 
 probably having up there in town, and there is much 
 
 250
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 in me that would like to stop him. I can't enjoy 
 myself in that way any longer, why should he ? And 
 I might feel tempted to say a word to him on the 
 subject, if I thought that affairs were his main business 
 in life ; if, in fact, I did not believe him to be really 
 keen on his Socialism. I see danger for a man when 
 love absorbs him, danger of his becoming the lap dog 
 of some woman. The only way to keep women in 
 their place is to keep love in its place. Love in a man's 
 life should be the sweets and dessert ; the more serious 
 courses should be composed of other fare. It is be- 
 cause Arthur takes his politics seriously, because he is 
 able to lose himself in devotion to something im- 
 personal, that he can relegate love and women to their 
 proper place that of a diversion. Socialism supplies 
 him with his roast beef, and he need not make his 
 staple of meringues. And so I can find it in my heart 
 even to be glad of his political views. They provide 
 him with an anchor from which he can swing at ease ; 
 they give his life the necessary core." 
 
 " Politics may be all very well," said Nancy, " but 
 Arthur's politics are so dreadful. He wants to take 
 away people's property and give it to the poor, and 
 shut up the churches. He thinks everybody ought to 
 be equal." 
 
 " You can't approve of Socialism," added James. 
 " It's death to the community. It will kill initiative 
 and enterprise, and reduce us to the level of paupers, 
 with State officials poking their nose into every window 
 of our workhouse, to see if we are bringing up our 
 children according to regulation." 
 
 " I don't approve of it, James ; I've told you so. I 
 think that as a form of Government it would be rotten. 
 It would give the incompetent an unlimited right to 
 
 251
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 check the activities of the competent, and nothing 
 would ever get done. As a habit of life it would be 
 equally unpleasant ; it would produce on a large scale, 
 and invest with all the cachet of State authority, the 
 kind of interference in your private affairs that you are 
 now trying to effect in Arthur's. I never saw such a 
 Socialistic move from a set of convinced individualists 
 as your deputation to me this afternoon. But all that 
 is not the point. The point is that Socialism is all the 
 go just now in intellectual circles ; what's more, it's 
 the coming force in politics, and anyone who has got 
 the sense to see what is coming and wants political 
 advancement will join the Labour Party and announce 
 extreme opinions with sufficient violence and assertive- 
 ness to make it worth somebody's while to give him a 
 fat job with an income to match and a knighthood in 
 the offing to stop his mouth. 
 
 " Whatever else it may be, it's right down good 
 common sense for a young man politically inclined to 
 profess Socialism just at present. He is in the fashion, 
 he attracts attention, and if he is a good speaker he 
 can make himself a nuisance. Now, owing to our 
 tradition of freedom, our way with nuisances is not to 
 imprison them (unless they happen to be poor and 
 insignificant), but to bribe them into discontinuing the 
 annoyance. That's what will happen to Arthur. 
 Either the Labour Party will offer him a seat, or the 
 Government will, and if politics is what it used to be, 
 he'll accept the first offer that is made." 
 
 " How can you say such things, dear ? I can't think 
 that Arthur would stoop to that sort of thing," said Ida. 
 
 " A moment ago you were furious with him for taking 
 Socialism seriously. Now, when I suggest that his 
 ideas may be only a shrewd dodge to get political 
 
 252
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 advancement, you call it sordid. Is there no pleasing 
 the woman ? Of course it's sordid. What would 
 you ? We are talking about public life. And is 
 public life an occupation for a gentleman ? Not a bit 
 of it. You may ask, then, why I let Arthur go into it ? 
 Mainly because I have my doubts whether Arthur is a 
 gentleman. I fancy none of the young men of to-day 
 are gentlemen in the sense in which we understood the 
 word : they have neither dignity nor serenity ; they 
 think it necessary to apologize for indolence, and they 
 do not know how to enjoy themselves properly. They 
 rush at enjoyment in half-hours snatched from the 
 service of some cause or other. 
 
 " I like my Arthur because he is my son, I suppose, 
 but I find him difficult to talk to, and I can't bear his 
 manners. He is rude, for instance, to his mother. 
 Now, I was always taught to be polite even to the 
 people I disliked. I never treated my friends, for 
 instance, with the consideration I reserved for my 
 relatives and acquaintances. Arthur, as far as I can 
 see, makes no difference. He is as rude to his acquaint- 
 ances as he is to his friends. Perhaps he hasn't any 
 friends. They are a queer lot, this Socialist intelli- 
 gentsia crowd he has got mixed up with. Probably 
 they don't admit the possibility of friendship. Not 
 intellectual or fleshly enough for them. Everything 
 must be one or the other, I suppose. 
 
 " 'Mph ! a queer lot for Arthur to be among the 
 Ephemeral Club ! Yes, I've seen them : a lot of 
 grubby, unworthy, middle-class, suburban people 
 spending their time poking about among facts, and 
 elaborately explaining how a thing might have been 
 what it isn't. Timid fools ! They have all sorts of 
 beliefs and haven't the courage to live up to them. 
 
 253
 
 They believe in overturning the State, yet invest in 
 war-saving certificates to keep it going. They believe 
 that love should be free, and put rings round the 
 fingers of their women. They believe in the socializa- 
 tion of the means of production, and object to the 
 socialization of the means of reproduction. Not an 
 illegitimate child among them ! Hybrids, that's what 
 they are, about equally composed of the old world and 
 the new,, professing a peevish discontent with the old, 
 but lacking the vision to realize the new. There they 
 are, Mivians, Ephemerals, and the rest of them, poking 
 and probing and fussing over society like a lot of little 
 insects scratching about on the head of a bald man, 
 expecting to make the hair grow, when all the time the 
 head wants replanting. I'm mortally sorry Arthur 
 ever got mixed up with that galere \ What are they 
 fit for ? For nothing but to go on listening to another 
 talking." 
 
 Mr. Pramp paused a moment, and the deputation, 
 who had been at first puzzled, then irritated, and 
 finally bored by these peevish and disconnected 
 remarks, pulled itself together with a start at this last 
 utterance. 
 
 Nancy, who had not understood a word for the last 
 half-hour, hearing something that seemed to be 
 intelligible for the first time, woke up. 
 
 " Then why don't you put a stop to it, dear ? " she 
 said. " He ought not to do what you don't approve 
 of, and you can stop it at once if you like. I shouldn't 
 give him any money if he behaved like that." 
 
 " I tell you once for all," replied Pramp, " that 
 Arthur shall do as he likes. It is not my business to 
 interfere with him. He has as much right to sow his 
 intellectual wild oats as his moral ones, and if they 
 
 2 54
 
 THE FAMILY AND THE CLUB 
 
 bring a harvest of Socialism, that's his look out. He 
 will have to live under it, not I." 
 
 " Meanwhile, I suppose," said James, " he may run 
 the country to the devil, financed by you, and assisted 
 by those horrors Ida saw in London ? " 
 
 " On the contrary, I do not believe that anything 
 that Arthur and all his friends can do will make the 
 slightest difference to the country. Nothing anybody 
 can do will make any difference. I'm not a fatalist, 
 but I can see that the State has grown so big, the 
 forces that animate society so complex, that nobody 
 can control them, nobody can even foresee their out- 
 come. What happens is not due to the wickedness of 
 Arthur's friends, or the stupidity of people like our- 
 selves, or the weakness of the Government, or anything 
 of that kind. It is the automatic result of the interplay 
 of blind economic forces which escape human control 
 and direction. If these forces are drifting to a 
 catastrophic change, not all that we can do will stop 
 them. If they make for stability, not all that Arthur's 
 lot can do will upset them. 
 
 " But it's a soulless business, anyway. I can't see 
 any fun in politics myself. It's like playing marbles 
 on the crater of a volcano ; and if the thing does blow 
 up it won't be very nice for us, you know. How would 
 you like to be strung up to the nearest lamp-post as a 
 bourgeois, eh James ! while your wife was being raped 
 on the altar of socialized love, and your kids merged in 
 a state creche, with about a hundred to one chance 
 against the society that comes out of it all being any 
 better than ours ? Not that that bothers you much, 
 anyway, I'll be bound. 
 
 " No, I prefer to leave politics alone. In a world of 
 fools one's first duty is to concentrate on oneself. 
 
 2 55
 
 THE HIGHBROWS 
 
 Politics and so forth are for those who are young 
 enough to think they matter. Arthur does, and I 
 shall certainly not dispel his illusions. We old ones 
 had better be content with our food and gossip. 
 That's what we like, after all, especially the food. As 
 for living, our children will see to that for us. All of 
 which reminds me that it's quite time for tea. Come 
 along."
 
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