Nicholas Mosley - A Garden of Trees

When Annabelle had first moved into the flat these relations had done their best to move in with her, or at least to persuade her to move in with them. They had said that it would be more proper. But she had held out against them, and in this she was supported by her parents, who showed their regard for their children by letting them do as they wished. So Annabelle kept the flat and cleaned it and did the cooking with the help of a woman who came in each day, and it was there that Peter had come during his week-ends and his leaves from the army, and it was there that Marius came during the holiday that Peter had before he was due to go to Oxford.

For a while the three of them lived there together, and Marius stayed ostensibly as a friend of Peter’s. But when Peter went away there was talk about Marius staying on in the flat alone with Annabelle, so for a time Marius had gone away out of deference to this talk; but Annabelle’s scorn toward such scruples was so prolonged and vehement that eventually he moved back again out of deference to her. The talk had continued, anyway, even when he had gone: for people argued that he would not have left if he had not had something to hide. As Annabelle said, to run one’s life according to the theories of others is a business too contradictory to be considered even out of kindness. So Marius stayed, and the necessary attempts at explanation were made, and the parents had not minded. And anyhow, Peter was not away for long.

Peter had gone to Oxford and had hated it with all the fury of which he was capable, and had walked out before the end of his first term. He said to me once: “Oxford is like a flea-circus: you can suspend a flea from wires and pretend that its struggles are acrobatics, but it can never get off the wires and it can never stop being a flea.” In all this talk of Oxford he used phrases like these, as if the only people he had met there were either parasites or puppets, and the pride that drove them only the parade of greed. But his talk was always exaggerated, and I do not know what was in his heart. In the army he had been happy, because he had expected nothing from it, and yet in spite of the drudgery he had found something, with surprise — the simplicity of simple people doing things that are supposed to be unpleasant. And at Oxford he had expected something, because he had been told to expect it, and he had found only the complications of complicated people doing things that are supposed to be pleasant. He had been taken up by the societies, by the clubs, by the serious young men with portfolios: he had sat in the junior common room and had been smothered by smoke and tea: he had felt the heaviness of the jokes and the lightness of the discussions: he had written his essays as judgments and been told that he was not in a position to judge: he had studied other people’s judgments and decided that there was no one in a position to judge. He had gone to some lectures and had not heard them, to others and had not understood them, others again and had wished that he had neither heard nor understood. At first he had tried to work, but in his mind all the time was the conviction that his work was irrelevant, that it was a fraud, that several thousand people were playing logical acrostics and were claiming that they were dealing with philosophical truth. This was what obsessed him — the knowledge that what he wanted was judgment and truth, and the fear that what he was getting was instruction in crossword puzzles. He wouldn’t have minded, perhaps, if this had been admitted. But it wasn’t. The instruction was solemn, circumlocutory, and ceaseless. The instructors were as grandiloquent as emperors or saints. He even heard, one evening, during a sermon by the Master, his college described as a temple in which men’s souls were kept pure by the bright virginity of scholarship. This was a schoolroom where they played lexington and lotto! A barrack-room housey-housey fitting numbers into squares! He walked out of the sermon, because he felt ill, and then he stopped trying to work.

He shared a room with a man of thirty, who was married, and who could not afford to stop working. This man made noises in his throat while he worked; and when he was not making noises in his throat he was knocking his pipe out on his boot or blowing through it like a whistle. So Peter went out. He would have had to have gone out anyway, he said, because the room was so cold, and because the only arm-chair had a loose spring in it that hummed like a harmonium. Also the ugliness was aggressive: the wallpaper brown, the carpet green, the upholstery muddy. So he went out to parties, and he gave parties himself, and he was quite taken up by the party-going people.

He gave gramophone parties that were stopped by the Dean, river-boat parties that were stopped by proctors, dance-hall parties that were stopped by the police. He climbed up over walls, along across roofs, down through windows. He fell through buttery skylights into bursars’ arms. At tea time he picked up girls with their evening dresses tucked up beneath their coats, at breakfast time he returned them re-tucked to their colleges after a celibate night in the streets. If he was locked out after midnight he could not get in before dawn, if he tried to sleep in the daytime he was disturbed by traffic and bells. Indeed, he said that it was the bells that finally drove him to leave. There was one that exploded just outside his window every quarter of an hour, and he claimed that it broke his tooth glass and did not even give accurate time.

And throughout all this period there was the gossip, and the intrigues, and the jealousy;—the strain of social pleasure revolving like bicycle wheels in the street. Bicycles whizzing up Broad Street, whizzing down St. Giles, with the gossip whizzing secretly on tyres of whispered words. Peter played, pedaled, and went faster than the rest. For a time he was rumoured to be engaged to three girls at once, and men spent sleepless nights explaining his success in terms of snobbery. He bought a car, and they said he was a millionaire; he sold it, and they said he was bankrupt. They followed him to Woodstock, they followed him down the Thames; they followed him voraciously, in a swarm, and then suddenly he stopped. The bells, for the last time, had broken his tooth glass.

So he left Oxford, and he came away hating things, for he felt that Oxford was a microcosm of the world. His memories of the army were no use to him, for he knew that what one finds in the army does not exist outside its ranks. He hated in general, in theory, the work, the play, societies and systems — but he never really hated individuals. I think that individuals were too precious to him; and there was too much love in him also beneath the fury, and it was this that made him so violent. There was more love in him than in most of the people I have known and it was always trying to come out, so that his indignation had to fight to squash it. His indignation won because the world in which he found himself invites more indignation than love on the surface, and he could not get beneath the surface because he felt so uncompromisingly about the evidence of his ears and eyes. He judged himself on his actions, and so he judged the world on its actions, and he judged fiercely, ruthlessly, with a desperate overworking of his conscience that could not tolerate mistakes. This, of course, was the biggest mistake of all; as he had been told at Oxford, one is not in a position to judge the world. Also, if he had paid more attention to his own shortcomings, as Annabelle had told him, instead of those of the world, he might have made fewer mistakes himself and thus eased the strain on his conscience. But with all his feelings turned outwards from himself, outwards towards evidence about which he felt so strongly that he had to judge it, he had to rage against it or else the strain upon his conscience would have broken him. He could not accept things. He was a sensitive person, and in his way an unselfish one. That is what gave him his talent for funniness, his talent for laughter and making other people love. But I think that the only people he ever loved himself were Annabelle and Marius.