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I heard my country calling, away across the sea,
Across the waste of waters she calls and calls to me.
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
*
December 1918.
'Oh, it's not in the least difficult,' Bagot says. 'After all, he doesn't concern himself with my morals. It could be much worse.' He smiles upwards, not meeting Green's eyes: his own are dark with pride and with fatigue, as he kicks the grate idly and listens to the rattle until it stops.
Green says, 'You're revolting, what do you think this is? The Loom of Youth? Or do you suppose he loves you, that he'll take you away to Morocco with him, something like that?' I might as well be pent in an iron maiden, he thinks. What's the use of this, after all? Three more years, nine more terms, countless icy plunges, interminable games -- and having missed, with uncommon good fortune, the dregs of the war, Oxford. But for what? There too, he is certain, the traces of Richard Bordeaux will remain like something even less licit than a smuggled vial of scent, the stuff of a Kipling, five-and-twenty-ponies boyhood: which seems, already, long gone. He is fifteen years old, like Bagot, and he fags for Henry Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke has never touched him. Not even his shoulder. Not even his wrist. Not even to beat him, or at least not yet. Damn my mother, Greene thinks. If I were not so accomplished with the toasting fork, he'd be dissatisfied, he'd cast me off. Something might happen to me, for a change.
Bagot turns onto his front, rucking up the hearth rug as he moves, clumsy with pain. He catches Green's eye and smiles at once. 'He didn't; he's never beaten me. Old Percy did it -- and with every stroke, you know, I imagine I can feel a delicious quiver. On his part, I mean. Yellow bastard; Bordeaux says he probably pretends that we're little Krauts and he's in the running for a brilliant V. C.'
'Bordeaux says.'
'He said it today. After tea, he came into the pantry when I was washing up. You'd already gone; Bolingbroke's always finished sooner.'
'He doesn't talk so much.' Green closes his exercise book and slides the crib under a cushion. What's the use, he asks himself platintively, of trying to get any of it done, if Bagot will talk on like a bread-and-butter miss, murmuring Bordeaux's opinions as though it were in an aesthete's power to issue divine decrees -- what's the bloody use, Green thinks, of doing one's prep? Even done after a fashion, which is certainly how I do it, the futility of Troy is scarcely worth an argument, even a silent one, even with myself. But oh, who is my Achilles, who can he be?
'He gave me Les Fleurs du mal. I've already got it, but this is a nicer one; it's bound in pale blue and silver.' He watches Green hear his words. We are not friends now, he thinks -- or at least, not exactly. His throat hurts, and he tries out some more words in his mind, a new truthfulness: power hurts me, I think. Or else I've caught Bushy's cold. Love, or embrocation? I can't be the first person to wonder which one is called for; and love, surely -- love, what else is of any use to me? When I grow up I shall be poor, I've always known that. But I suppose it doesn't matter, for I can paint, can't I? That saint-like, traditional gold, with its living hint of red, as though even his hair would bleed if someone wronged him. As if anybody would -- but the cheek of thinking so, the sheer bald cheek. I positively deserve old Percy, ten times over.
Green says, 'I shall take Bushy's prep up to the San. Any message?'
'A plague on his chilblains. Or whatever it is. I don't know.'
'A cold,' Green says. 'A feverish cold. Do you know, I heard Aumerle say to Bolingbroke that they don't let you have a half holiday if someone dies -- I mean, at school. That's what they think of us.'
'Nobody dies of a feverish cold. Not even a tick like Bushy.'
'No. But if he did, don't expect anything. Don't get your hopes up. Don't anticipate relief.'
'I never do,' Bagot says, but he is altogether lying.
*
June 1919.
Henry walks nervelessly to the crease, or so it seems to Richard Bordeaux. Richard is Head of House; he is still in and like to stay there, but he is conscious -- as his cousin is not -- of his own lightness, of figure and skin and attire; his taut and delicate strength; his impeccable impression of the pure. In the sunlight, the whole pitch dazzles him. He waits, as he is by now so used to waiting, for the next moment when he must act, under everyone's eyes, the bifurcated part of scholar-prefect and aesthete-cricketer -- but his mind is full of pictures, medieval poems have supplied him with a lexicon and now, on his light-soaked, sweet-smelling, lonely stage, he makes full use of it. Next term, his valedictory Michaelmas, he will sit scholarship papers: but it seems that for weeks now he has been going his own way, enchanted by an English which seems raw and young, of course, beside the Greeks, but then so does Italian, so does everything, so do the cloisters and the chapel and the earth itself. It's too soon to say, I like this better, but he does like it, this young English, he likes its animals and its clear, schematic colourings; he likes its frank religiosity, baroque before baroque was dreamed of, and in particular its wit, its lovers, its meandering paradises.
'How's that?'
'Not out.'
The bowling is too easy. All the strength is concentrated in School House this year, Richard thinks. I suppose that nobody can beat us, and that's why it's palling: that must be why. You can, after all, be too good for your own good, at least for now. He turns his mind away from the perspiration under his hair, the strong light, and Henry's desolate concentration -- the look of a man who wants his own side to lose, at least a little, since he is playing for School House, Richard's house, and he thinks that Richard deserves no further victories. Yet he will not play badly. If only we had gone to war, Richard thinks, what a chance for him, how lucky. God knows if I'd have stood it; perhaps I would. Or perhaps, after all, not -- it would have been one of three ways, I think. Neurasthenia, or a breast heavy with medals: or bleeding in a foxhole, terribly slowly, with plenty of time to think.
Henry Bolingbroke watches the dropping ball, his mind pinched into focus. His cousin thinks of Passchendaele and Ypres, and the honours boards filling up with gold as though under the management of Barabas himself. He thinks of Cambrai, and Arras, and the grave on Skyros. To cast off my old affections should be a ritual, at my time of life, he thinks. And yet given the circumstances, in such bad taste.
School House wins by a handsome margin, and Richard Bordeaux watches his fag prepare the cricket tea, and then watches his cousin's eyes, and dreams, and waits, and listens to the squits chasing each other outside and shouting, for they are younger even than Bagot -- and they sound innocent, though he knows them to be monstrously cruel when wronged. Oh, my dear cousin, he thinks. You cannot forgive me. When you look at me you hear the click of our teeth meeting, and it ruins you again and again, and you blame me. What a sorry thing, though not for me.
He says, 'I shan't play at Oxford, there must be better things to do. Or so I imagine.' If I were not so kind as I am, I'd smile at him now, he thinks. What a sorry thing. Why be dour without cause? The clay lies over enough of us, surely. Even you, Henry, can't argue with me there.
*
Her sword is girded at her side, her helmet on her head,
And round her feet are lying the dying and the dead.
I hear the noise of battle, the thunder of her guns,
I haste to thee my mother, a son among thy sons.