Fragment Of A Novel

To myself,
Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
to whose sympathy and
appreciation alone it owes its being,
this book is dedicated.
Dedicatory letter,
My dear Evelyn,
Much has been written and spoken about the lot of the boy with literary aspirations in a philistine family; little can adequately convey his difficulties, when the surroundings, which he has known from childhood, have been entirely literary. It is a sign of victory over these difficulties that this book is chiefly, if at all, worthy of attention.
Many of your relatives and most of your father’s friends are more or less directly interested in paper and print. Ever since you first left the nursery for meals with your parents downstairs, the conversation, to which you were an insatiable listener, has been of books, their writers and producers; ever since, as a sleepy but triumphantly emancipate school-boy, you were allowed to sit up with our elders in the “bookroom” after dinner, you have heard little but discussion about books. Your home has always been full of them; all new books of any merit, and most of none, seem by one way or another to find their place in the files which have long overflowed the shelves. Among books your whole life has been layed and you are now rising up in your turn to add one more to the everlasting bonfire of the ephemeral.
And all this will be brought up against you. “Another of these precocious Waughs,” they will say, “one more nursery novel.” So be it. There is always a certain romance, to the author at least, about a first novel which no reviewer can quite shatter. Good luck! You have still high hopes and big ambitions and have not yet been crushed in the mill of professionalism. Soon perhaps you will join the “wordsmiths” jostling one another for royalties and contracts, meanwhile you are still very young.
Yourself,
Evelyn

I
Peter Audley awoke with “second bell” ringing dismally down the cloisters and rolling over in bed looked at his watch. Reassured that he had another five minutes before he need begin getting up, he pulled his rug up over his shoulders and lay back gazing contentedly down the dormitory, which was already stirring with the profoundly comforting sounds made by other people dressing. The splashing of the showers next door, the chipping of the thick crockery and the muttered oaths at backstuds accentuated the pleasure of the last minutes.
Early school was kept up practically all the year round at Selchurch, which took a certain pride in the gloom of these early mornings. Peter, however, had got his “privileges” which took away the bitterest sting of frantic punctuality and allowed him, after reporting to his form master, to sit out and work in his study.
With a heave he got out of bed and went to wash. The showers looked singularly uninviting but the water for the basins was stone cold—the furnaces were not lit until midday in March 1918—and with rising gloom he returned shivering and half dry to the dormitory. Some fanatic had opened one of the high Gothic windows and a cold gust of wind swept down the room. There was a chorus of protestastion and the window was closed. He dressed dully and leaving the dormitory at a few minutes past seven crossed the quad to “report.” Several fags, laden with books, dashed past him, trying desperately to avoid recognition by the prefect “taking lates.” His form master nodded to him and he turned on his heel and made for his study. The gravel was dark with fallen rain, the sky menacing with monstrous rough hewn clouds; over everything spread a fine, wet mist.
The handle of his study door was cold; he went in, kicked the door to and fell into an easy chair gazing round the tiny room. It was pleasant enough and he had spent considerable pains on it, but this morning it afforded him no pleasure.
The carpet was black—a burst of aestheticism which he had long regretted as it took a great deal of brushing and earned his study the name of the “coal cellar”—and the walls distempered a bluish grey. On them were hung four large Medici prints, the gift of his grandmother but his own choice; Botticelli’s Mars & Venus—he had had some difficulty over this with his house master, to whom a nude was indecent whether it came from the National Gallery or La Vie Parisienne—Beatrice d’Este, Rembrandt’s “Philosopher” and Holbein’s Duchess of Milan. These he liked either because they were very beautiful or because they gave an air of distinction which his friends’ Harrison Fishers and Rilette pictures lacked. The curtains, cushions on the window seat and table cloth were blue; the whole room was pleasantly redolent of the coffee of the evening before.
Peter, however, lay back staring gloomily at the grey block of class rooms opposite. It was Saturday morning and Saturday afternoon was the time chosen, as being the longest uninterrupted time in the week, for the uniform parade. He could just remember when, his first term, summer 1914, it had been the great social time of the week when tea was brewed and quantities of eclaires eaten, and now that he had grown to an age to have a study and enjoy these things, they were all blotted out and from two to six he would have to manoeuvre a section of sullen fags over the wet downs in some futile “attack scheme.”
He knew exactly what would happen. They would fall in on one of the quads and be inspected—that meant half an hours work with reeking brasso and s.a.p. cleaning his uniform and equipment. They would then march up to the downs and in a driving wind stand easy while the O.C. explained the afternoons work. Ordnance maps would be issued to all N.C.O.’s with which to follow the explanation; these always bulged with incorrect folding and flapped in the wind.
It was never considered sufficient for one company merely to come and attack the other; a huge campaign of which they formed a tiny part would have to be elaborated. A company would be the advanced guard of part of an army, which had landed at Littlehampton and was advancing upon Hasting, intending to capture important bridge heads on the local river on their way; B company, with white hat bands, would be a force set to hold the spur of the downs above the Sanatorium cooperating with hypothetical divisions on either flank, until another division could arrive from Arundel. Rattles would be issued to serve as Lewis guns and this game of make-believe would go on for three hours, with extreme discomfort to both sides, when whistles and bugles would sound and the corps form up again for a criticism of the afternoon’s work. They would be told that, when the parade was dismissed, all rifles were to be wiped over with an oily rag before being returned to the armoury and that all uniforms were to be back in the lockers before six o’clock. They would then dismiss, hungry, bad tempered and with only twenty minutes in which to change for Chapel.
He hated the corps and all the more now that he had to take it seriously. He was seventeen and a half; next year, if the war was still on, as it showed every sign of being, would see him fighting. It brought everything terribly near. He had learnt much of what it was like over there from his brother, but Ralf saw everything so abstractedly with such imperturbable cynicism. Peter flattered himself that he was far more sensitive and temperamental. He was sure that he would not be able to stand it; Ralf had won the D.S.O. some months ago.
He collected his thoughts with a start and looked at his time table. He had to finish the chapter of Economics which he had left the evening before. The book was lying where he had tossed it and, like everything that morning, looked singularly uninviting. It was bound in a sort of greasy, limp, oil cloth, “owing,” a label half scraped off the back proclaimed, “to shortage of labour”; it was printed crookedly on a thin greyish paper with little brown splinters of wood in it; it was altogether a typical piece of wartime workmanship. He took it up with listless repulsion and began to read.
“From considerations of this nature,” he read, “which, while not true of every person, taken individually, are yet on the average true, it may be inferred, with approximate accuracy, that by adding to the wealth of the poor, something taken, by some recognised and legal process, from the wealth of the rich, while some dissatisfaction as well as satisfaction is inevitably caused, yet, provided that the poor be greater in number than the rich, the satisfaction is greater than the dissatisfaction. Inequality of wealth, insofar as ...”
It was all ineffably tedious. He tossed the book on to the table in the corner and taking up a novel passed the next half hour in dissatisfied gloom.

II
The clock in the quad struck quarter to eight and voices and shuffling sounded across the gravel as the forms began emptying. The door of his study was burst open and Bellinger came in.
“Edifying spectacle of history specialist at work! Here have I been doing geography with the ‘door mouse’ for three mortal quarters of an hour, while you read low novels.”
Bellinger was in the army class, a cheery soul, athletic, vacant, with an obsession for clothes. This was the only subject about which he could talk; he was always perfectly dressed himself and had earned something of a reputation by it. People would bring him patterns of cloth and consult him when they were getting suits, which was complimentary, although they never took his advice. It was said of him that he had once cut the headmaster in London because he met him wearing a brown overcoat with evening dress.
Peter turned down the corner of his page—a pernicious habit even in a wartime “Outlines of Economics” of which he could never cure himself—and got up.
“Come across to hall, you silly old ass, and tell me the latest bulletins from Sackville Street.”
“Nothing doing,” said Bellinger with the self righteous gloom of one whose religion has been insulted and pulled at the points of his waistcoat, “nothing doing at all. It’s the curse of this infernal war. While all the best people are in uniform they don’t pay any attention to civilian fashions. Thank the Lord I shall be in khaki in a couple of months.”
They linked up and walked down to hall, Bellinger earnestly enlarging upon the advantages of the R.A.F. over the ordinary uniform.
When they arrived at the “pits-table,” where people with studies sat, a heated discussion was going on. The head, Peter gathered, had proposed to the Games Committee the night before that none of the house cups should be competed for until after the war and that the time saved should be devoted to more parades and longer digging upon the house potatoe plots. Cook, the captain of Lane’s, had apparently been the only one with the courage to hold out against him. Lane’s were certain to get the open football and stood a good chance for the Five Mile.
Beaton, a small science specialist, was voluble in the head’s defence.
“After all,” he was saying, “what effects has the war had on us here? We’ve had a little less food and coal, people have been leaving a little earlier, the young masters have gone and these antiquated old fools like Boyle have taken their places, parades have become a bit longer, but is this enough? Has anything been done to make us realize that we are in the middle of the biggest war in history?”
“Everything has been done,” said Peter, “to make school life excessively unpleasant—after you with the bread, please Travers—what little of the old life does remain, is what keeps it just tolerable. Good God, isn’t it bad enough for you. I pity the men who’ve come during the last year and know only this side of Selchurch. I hate school, now, and shall be only too glad to get away; why utterly spoil it for the ‘underschools’?”
“Yes,” said Travers a large, sad “historian” on the other side of the table, “You seem to be one of the maniacs who believe in making themselves wretched because other people are. It’s only by the misery of three quarters, that life can be even tolerable for a quarter of society. It’s unjust but it’s better than the whole show being miserable. It’s a fundamental principle of political science”—any particularly sweeping cynicism was a “fundamental principle” with Travers.
“My pater had that craze badly in 1914,” said Garth, a pleasant, spotty youth, next to Peter, “he dug up the tennis court to grow vegetables when there was plenty of waste ground behind the stable yard.”
“And the mater makes me wear old clothes,” said Bellinger, “because she thinks it looks bad to wear new ones in war time.”
“Everyone is quite imbecile about the war”—Travers loved dismissing subjects—“they don’t realize that it is a natural function of development. It’s a fundamental principle that society can only remain normal if it is decimated at regular periods.”
The “paper boy” came to the table. Every day it was the duty of one of the fags to fetch the house papers from the porter’s lodge, as soon as he came out of early school, and bring them up to hall. They were supposed to go to the people who had bought them at the “paper auction” at the beginning of term, but in practice they went first to the high table where the prefects sat with the housemaster; when they had made their choice, he took them to the “pits-table” and distributed what were left as he liked.
“Times, please” said Peter over his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Audley, that’s gone.”
“All right, Morning Post. Thanks.”
He spread it out over the table and glanced down the columns. It was full of the usual war news (Peter wondered vaguely what they managed to put in the papers in peace time); there were rumours of preparations for a big German offensive, factious political questions in the house, pages of minor engagements in the East. He folded it and passed it on to Bellinger.

III
It was a gloomy morning; gloomy even for the Easter term 1918. For half an hour after breakfast he sat in his study cleaning his uniform; in chapel he could smell the cleaning stuff up his nails. After chapel he had to go in for a double period of European History. He went into school profoundly depressed.
The “historians” were now taken by one Boyle. He had been, until the outbreak of war, the headmaster of a prosperous preparitory school on the East coast and had lived a life of lucrative dignity, making himself agreeable to distinguished parents and employing a large and competent staff to do the teaching. For two years he had kept doggedly on, feeling that it would be a surrender to the barbarian enemy if he left, but the numbers steadily sank, until one night a bomb was actually dropped onto the gymnasium breaking every frame of glass in the house. Then he realized that he must give it up, “St. Pendred’s” was commandeered to house a garrison staff, and Mr. Boyle set about finding other employment. The head forced to choose between Mr. Boyle and a mistress, to his eternal discredit chose Mr. Boyle and in less than a year the Senior History Specialist Set had sunk from the intellectual mekka of the school to the haven which sheltered those who considered that the work they had had to do to pass the School Certificate absolved them from any further exertions, at any rate, while they were at Selchurch. Not that he was ragged—that would have been beneath the dignity of a Sixth Form set—They merely sat through his hours in complete apathy. His predecessor had been a young man fresh from Cambridge and had made his history extremely entertaining, they had held debates, read each other papers and discussed current politics, but now there were no Varsity scholarships, the battle clouds of France shut out all but the immediate future and no one had any particular motive for, or interest in, working. Mr. Boyle certainly had not and Youth, far from being the time of burning quests and wild, gloriously vain ideals beloved of the minor poets, is essentially one of languor and repose. Every hour he dictated notes, from a large leather bound note book, which most people took; every week he set an essay which several people wrote; every month he gave out a syllabus of books for out of school study, which nobody read. He asked for little and was content with far less but the Senior History Specialist set often seemed unsatisfactory even to Mr. Boyle.
He came into the class room smiling a dignified welcome all round, laid his note book on one side of the high oak desk, his mortar board on the other, and sat down smoothing out his gown.
“Good morning, gentlemen,” he began in his usual formula, “What are we doing this morning? European history, isn’t it Travers? Thank you. Ah yes, well I don’t think we can do better than go on with our notes for a little. Now let me see where was it we had got to. Alberoni? Yes I see I have the place marked. The last thing I gave you was ‘willing to cede Sardinia to secure her nephew’s succession to the Duchy of Parma’ wasn’t it? Well then, head this ‘D. Alberoni’s third coalition.’” For two hours he dictated an essay on XVIIth diplomacy.
Peter had reduced the taking of notes to an entirely subconscious exercise. He could now sit schooled by long practice, with his mind completely blank or filled with other things while his pen wrote out pages of notes industriously and quite correctly. Sometimes he would be woken from his reverie by a pause over some proper name, but often on looking them through he would find names which he had no recollection of having heard before. He sat writing out,
“... invited ‘pretender’ to Spain and arranged with Görz a northern alliance with Sweden and Russia to support the Stuart claims, while at the same time he entered into correspondence with Polignac and the Duchess of Main, to overthrow the Regency. The death of Charles XII, however.....”
Mr. Boyle’s notes did not elucidate any difficult problems or sift the important facts of history from the trivial. They merely stated things in direct paraphrase of Lodge; for the whole double period Peter steadily took them down.
At last the clock chimed and Mr. Boyle stood up, shut his note book and took up his mortar board. “That will be enough for this morning, I think. Remember that I want the essays on ‘The Freedom of the civilized State’ by Monday evening, without fail this time please. I will ask you to read up Catherine the Great for next Tuesday, if you will—I recommend Lecky. Thank you, good morning.”
Wearily they filed out for break. In the war time efficiency mania P.T. had been innovated which effectually took up all the break—ten minutes in which to change and twenty minutes drill. Peter hurried to the changing room and began undressing; he suddenly remembered that he had broken the lace of his gym shoe the day before. He succeeded in borrowing another and then realized that he had forgotten to get a new hat for parade as he had been told to last time. Everything seemed to be conspiring against him this morning.
“You never lose a stud but you lose the lot,” sighed Bellinger, “Hullo, what the devil does he want.”
Peter looked round and saw the porter’s burly figure framed in the doorway.
“Telegram for Mr. Audley, sir.”
“Hullo, what?” Peter tore open the orange envelope and hurriedly took out the telegram; it was getting late for P.T.
“Ralf on leave,” it ran, “return home wiring head will meet 4:52 Bulfrey.”

IV
One of the awfully clever things that Ralf had said was that life should be divided into water tight compartments and that no group of friends or manner of living should be allowed to encroach upon any other. Peter lay back and compared the day with the prospects early that morning.
As soon as he had got the telegram he had put on his shoes and told the porter to ’phone for a taxi. After a frantic search for his house master and an incoherent but convincing explanation to him and a hurried interview with the matron about his bag, he had managed to get away in time to catch the 11:12 to Victoria. There he had had a hasty but excellent lunch at the Grosvenor and had dashed across to Paddington and got into the train just as it was starting.
He now had a clear two hours run to Bulfrey. He lay back and took a cigarette from the box he had bought at lunch. Very contentedly he watched the telegraph wires rising falling and recrossing each other, mile after mile.
He had not had time in the rush of half packed pyjamas, moving trains and lost tickets, to think of what it all meant; now in the empty first class carriage with magazines and cigarettes he began to shake off the shadows of the prison house. He looked at his watch. At the very time that he was swaying into the country through the short wayside stations, Bellinger and Beaton and Garth and everyone else with whose lives his own had seemed so inextricably bound that morning were marching about on the downs. It was very cold at Selchurch, he reflected and the sea mist was lying in the valleys; he was warm with the close atmosphere of the carriage and the glass of port he had had after lunch and with a deep inward content.
Mile succeeded mile through the avenue of telegraph poles. Outside the weather was clearing up and a bright cool sun came out. He watched the fields reeling by and began to pass the landmarks which had grown familiar through many home comings, an imposing patent medicine factory, the neat beds of a large market garden, an Elizabethan farmhouse.
He wondered how long this unexpected holiday was going to last; he supposed about four days. This was really the first time that Ralf had made any mark in his life; he was five years older and had always kept himself very much aloof. They had had many quarrels as brothers always have. At times Ralf had been almost a prig, particularly when he was head of the house at Selchurch, and his first year at Oxford. Anyway it was through him that Peter was now sitting in comfort instead of marching his section up a wet hill in “blob” formation, and in the warmth of heart that can come only from physical comfort, Peter prepared to be very gracious towards his brother.
At last the train slowed to a stop and stood panting but unexhausted like a well-trained runner. Peter suddenly realized that they had reached Bulfrey. He snatched up his hat and bag, buttoned his coat and leapt onto the platform. Ralf was striding down towards him.
Peter had seen him in uniform before but then it had been with the timid pride of a 1914 subaltern. Now after three years fighting he looked wonderfully fit and hansome. A slanting ray of sunlight lit up his fair hair; he was wearing no cap.
“Hullo, Peter,” he cried, shaking hands, “we were afraid that you mightn’t be able to get the train. I suppose you’ve had lunch?”
“Yes thanks, I managed to get some in town. Pretty fair rush though. Hold on a second while I find my ticket.” He handed Ralf his bag and began exploring his pockets. Finding it, at last, between the leaves of his school “blue-book,” he gave it to the collector and taking back his bag followed his brother out.
“Is that all the luggage you’ve got?” he asked, “That’s splendid; we shall be able to bring it up with us now. I’ve got the dog-cart outside. Moira’s looking after it. She was coming into Bulfrey to do some shopping so I asked her to come and meet you.”
Moira Gage was the daughter of the vicar of Bulfrey Combe. Peter’s age, she and her brother had been the constant companions of the Audley boys before they went to school. They had seen less of each other as they grew up, Chris had gone to Winchester, Ralf and Peter to Selchurch, but the Vicarage was next door to the Hall and they had seen a good deal of each other in the holidays. Their fathers were close friends.
“Good work, I was afraid she would be away doing that V.A.D. work. I only saw her once all last holidays. Ah there she is.”
They had come out into the small station yard. On the other side of it stood the dog-cart and in it stood Moira Gage, one hand holding the reins, the other shading her eyes. She was tall, slim and pale, not really pretty but graceful and attractive; from a distance she looked like a Shepperson drawing but when you got nearer you saw depths in her grey, scrutable eyes, which his charming mannerisms could never convey; she was dressed in a tweed coat and a skirt with a grey silk scarf over her shoulders. Peter ran forward and greeted her.
“Peter,” she said, “before you do anything else, do make Ralf put his hat on. He looks simply dreadful and I’m sure he’d be court-martialled or something, if anyone saw.”
“Three years of military life shatter any illusions about military discipline,” Ralf replied, climbing up into the dog-cart, “the only hardened militarist nowadays is the newly conscripted civilian.”
“Now he’s being clever again,” Moira laughed, “I really thought you lost that when you came down from Oxford. Among other things, it’s very bad manners when you are in stupid company.”
“Thank you,” Peter expostulated, “I wish you’d speak for yourself. I’m in the sixth now and write essays on industrial history and all sorts of things.”
“You seem to regard your history with most unreasonable pride,” said Moira, “from all I hear it sounds only slack.”
“All pride is unreasonable” said Ralf. To Peter it seemed that he had paused a moment hesitating whether “no pride is unreasonable” was the more impressive; he had long gone beyond the stage when a sweeping generalization could pass as an epigram.
“The aphorisms of a disappointed man,” said Moira. “The next remark like that Ralf and I get out and walk.”