A Prayer for my Son

Chapter 2. Heart And Soul Of A Young Man-1

Chapter 2. Heart And Soul Of A Young Man

Michael Brighouse was twenty-three years of age. He was two years old and a little bit on August 4th, 1914, six years of age and a little more on November 11th, 1918: the War, therefore, meant nothing to him at all and this inexperience was shared by all his contemporaries. He was not moved in the slightest by Armistice Day, or by any appeal to remember war veterans, or by Mr. Lloyd George's aspersions on Earl Haig's war conduct, or by the few remaining sentimental poets who still wailed about the unhappy time that they had had in the trenches. The War meant nothing to him also because he had all his life lived in a state of war. From the time when he had been at all conscious of any happening outside the excitement of his own rectory garden, there had been war going on somewhere, or if not actually war, at least conflict.

He had seen the kings fall and the despots rise; he had seen the American boom and the American slump; he had seen the quiet absorption of Manchukuo by the Japanese; he had seen the rise of Hitler, the flight of the Jews, the murder of Dollfuss, and only a week or two ago the plebiscite in the Saar. His generation, therefore, did not despair of the world as had the generation before them. Poets of Michael's day, Auden, Stephen Spender, Day Lewis, were the only figures at this moment in the world of art who were at all representing him. But there were thousands upon thousands of young men like Michael, who out of an extraordinary welter of machinery, speed, half-baked science, complete s****l frankness, poverty, cynicism and unemployment were achieving a new calm, not of indifference, but of a kind of philosophical humorous fortitude. The world was indeed a ludicrous mess, but it was a new world, as new as the early Elizabethan one had been. It offered, no doubt, every kind of parallel to that other splendid epoch--the speed, the machinery and the unemployment were all necessary parts of it. What a time to be alive in!

On the other hand, he had no illusions; above all, no sentimentality, no unbalanced idealism: 'Keep calm whatever may be offered you, be it death, supreme beauty, or a job at three pounds a week.' Michael was like his generation in all these things. He was like his generation, too, in that underneath the superficial colouring of his period he was like every other young man who had ever been--idealistic, sentimental, patriotic, sometimes very childish.

His father was rector of a small Dorset parish, and lived in perfect contentment there in a charming old rectory, with a high-walled garden, and a view from the upper windows over rolling down to the sea. Michael's father and mother were very philosophical people, that is, practically nothing disturbed them. Michael was their only son and they loved him, but they were quite happy when he was away, and always believed that all was for the best in God's world, even though Michael's mother had severe rheumatism in one leg and his father a heart that might kill him at any moment.

Michael went to school at Uppingham, had a history scholarship at Cambridge, got a double first and must, therefore, be considered a brilliant young man. He was not, however, really brilliant, but had a ready capacity for putting things on paper and a good memory. He knew very well that he was not brilliant. He knew that he might be a don--he didn't wish to be that. He thought that he would make a good journalist, but he didn't wish to be that either. He did not know until he had come to Cumberland what it was he wanted to be.

He knew his character pretty well. There was something weak in the middle of it, a soft, oozing spot somewhere. He was consistently to his own chagrin coming upon this mossy, boggy centre. It was not that he was sentimental so much as that he gave way before he knew it to unreasonable emotions, desires, impulses. He did not realize that no young man is a nice young man if he is hard right through. What exasperated him was that his consistent weakness was the result of no logic. He was quite ready to excuse weakness on definite philosophic grounds, but he hated to be ashamed of himself without a reason. The friends that he had made at Cambridge--Horlock, Redmayne, Burnam--were all perfectly aware of why they were weak when they wanted to be weak and what the results of their weakness would be. 'You see,' Redmayne would say, 'my doing that the other night proves what Jung says in his book'; or Horlock would simply cry, 'One must get one's fun where one can. It's poor fun. Isn't it astonishing that for thousands of years people have made such a fuss about love when this is all it comes to?' But Michael, alas! was far more unreasonable than his friends. One day when he was walking from Wastwater over to Eskdale he faced it quite frankly.

'I'm soft. I get bowled over by anything, but perhaps I am right. Perhaps there is more in this business than Horlock or Redmayne imagines.'

What he meant by 'this business' was the look-back from the spur of the fell to Wastwater, which lay black as jet in the Screes. The silence everywhere was so beautiful and comforting that it offered a true reassurance against these black waters. A sheep-trod running in front of him was also comforting. When he slept in Eskdale that night he determined to write to Horlock about it.

'You see, Horlock,' he meant to say, 'everything that we talked about at Cambridge is nonsense.' But of course in the morning he thought better of it. Every day in Cumberland put Horlock more out of touch. He began to grow a new spiritual skin.

He had always supposed that the tutoring of a small boy was as unpleasant a job as could ever be imagined. He did not care about small boys. He disliked the idea of teaching them anything. The word tutor was an offence. Some old schoolmaster friend wrote to his father to ask whether he knew of a likely young man who would give six months in a very lovely part of England to looking after a nice small boy. The point was that the pay was excellent and the work easy; the young man would have leisure to study for his own purposes. The point in Michael's case was that, lying in bed, he saw the white road which ran like the spine of a fish into a cluster of stars scattered about a moonlit sky. In this sky, and on either side of the road, rolled smaller hills, whitened with moonlit powder. This surprising scene had for him miraculous power. 'That,' he thought, 'is because I am nearly asleep,' but in the morning the power remained, and to his own astonishment he said to his father at breakfast:

'I think I'll go to these people--Fawcus, or whatever they are called.'

'It's time,' his father said gently,' that you should make up your mind what you are going to do.'

'I know quite well what I am going to do,' Michael said. 'I am going into the City to sell ivory collar-studs and make a lot of money. Then I am going to devote the money to--' He stopped.

'To what?' asked his mother. 'I hope you are enjoying the kedgeree because Cook made a great fuss when I said we were going to have it.'

'To what, I don't know,' Michael went on. 'The trouble is all the things you really care about seem to do better when you don't help them than when you do.'

'Why collar-studs?' asked his father.

'Because I know the man who has asked me to go in with him. He has inherited his father's business--it isn't only collar-studs of course.'

So in this indeterminate manner he went up to Cumberland. Before he went the schoolmaster friend of his father wrote to him:

'Old Fawcus is all right,' he said, 'if you remember the things that he has done in the past. He has been M.P. for the Penrith Division of Cumberland, but years ago. He served in the Boer War, which is why he is a colonel; but he isn't as real a colonel as he would like people to think he is. He has written monographs about monuments--bad ones. He is very easy to manage if you think him important. The boy is his grandson, illegitimate, but being brought up as heir to a great deal more than a non-existent estate. Fawcus has a spinster daughter. The house is ancient, and dark and cold, but the country is lovely, and the rain is not so bad as it sounds. I consider the pay more than adequate for what you will do, because the little boy is not tiresome and old Fawcus easily placated. There are, however, ghosts in the house--a certain madness--and I advise you, if anyone starts throwing spells, to watch out.'

This friend of his father was called Mr. Harris, and Michael thought he sounded so nice in his letter that he wanted to meet him in London, but Mr. Harris did not wish to be met. He was quite frank:

'I am sure you are a very nice young man,' he wrote. 'I had a great affection once for your father, but I care now only for chess, Bach and Handel. I live in Eastbourne and hate coming to London. Good-bye. Let me know how you get on in Cumberland.'

When later on Michael asked Colonel Fawcus about Mr. Harris, Fawcus said:

'Poor old Harris, as mad as a hatter! Went into King's Chapel once without his trousers.'

Be that as it might, Michael found everything that Mr. Harris had said very strangely true. The house was dark and ancient and cold; Miss Fawcus was a spinster all right; the Colonel liked flattery; the little boy was a nice little boy. These were the things that he discovered at first. It was only when he had been there some little while that the business of witchcraft and spells began to be apparent. It lay, of course, partly in the country. Michael read certain books about Cumberland and Westmorland. A man called Collingwood, he decided, was the only one who knew anything about the matter. Popular novels, with a great deal of highly coloured scenery, revolted him. The guide-books were for the most part concerned only with the tracks, stiles, stone walls, and seeing as many named places as possible from one particular point. Only two men since Wordsworth and Coleridge had written any poetry about the Lake District worthy of the name; nothing that anyone had written except Wordsworth and Collingwood, nothing that anybody said accounted for the curious spell that the country laid upon him. He could not put it into words, except that its main appeal at first was to his personal vanity. The little stone walls, the fell, the fields and the streams whispered to him, 'Nobody has ever understood us before you. We cannot tell you how relieved we are that you have come.' While they did this he knew that they were mocking. He determined at first that he would not allow himself to be cheap about the colour simply because popular novelists were so easily cheap about it, but he could not deny that one mulberry-tinted cloud resting its chin upon the white powdered line of Saddleback (the rest of the sky grey with impending snow) held an intangible delicacy beyond anything he had ever seen. He stared at it from the windows of the Hall waiting for it to go, because clouds are so lovely the shade must be impermanent. But the dark mulberry only lightened as he watched it to a sharper purple.

Snow began very faintly to fall across the shadow of the fell, and the dark trees of the Hall garden. But even this did not diminish the mulberry cloud. Shadows of pale gold, a final suggestion of a sun that had not appeared all day, broke into the grey expanse of sky, and then, steadily supporting the cloud, this was the only fragment of light and colour in all the world. As the falling snow thickened, the garden grew ever darker, and over the fell a whiteness gleamed. At last, when all was dark, he fancied that he could still see the mulberry cloud. He was never quite to lose sight of it again. Now coloured clouds and falling snow are not the property of the North of England alone, but he discovered that in this country, because the hills are so near and the stretches of water so personal, many things happen that seem personally significant. He decided that the whole country was bad for one's egotism.