The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ boy, that you have got a First.” Might not this very real triumph be repeated, in four years’ time? Corpus was the Bishop’s own college, and the President, Dr Thomas Fowler, was an old friend. Fowler was one of the great men of the University, a grammar-school boy from Lincolnshire who had become Professor of Logic, but valued philosophy principally as a means of training character; in his famous “private hours” he drew out his young men, and made them apply thought to conduct. To parents he made the terrifying observation, that if they failed to give their children a good education they were no better than the parents in primitive societies, who were permitted to put their children to death. He was both conscientious and sympathetic, and the terrible responsibility of choosing undergraduates for commissions for the Boer Wars was said to have shortened his life.

      Eddie went up to Corpus not only as a good classical scholar, but as an Edwardian elegant. He had never bought any clothes for himself before he was sixteen. Mrs K. made large orders at the drapers and outfitters as required, while in the “girls’ room” Winnie pinned and sewed, with Dilly intervening to adapt the sewing-machine to steam power. But the Bishop, who had suffered himself from reach-me-down clothes and “boots heeled, and, I think, tipped with iron—in vain did I attempt to deaden the hateful noises that attended my movements”—was sympathetic to his own boys, all of whom, except the lounging Dilly, had the instincts of a dandy. Eddie was made an allowance of a hundred pounds per annum, to be deducted from his share of the money left in trust by their mother. To the awe of the younger ones, he opened an account with a Birmingham tailor and a cigar merchant, and indulged his good taste in eau-de-Cologne and silk handkerchiefs.

      The Oxford to which he went up, on the other hand, was still a slumbrous place where the old eccentrics, whom Lewis Carroll had compared to caterpillars and fantastic birds, emerged from the “sets” which they had occupied for some forty years, complaining at the disturbance of young bloods. The University was still slowly digesting the Commission of 1877, aimed at diverting wealth from the colleges, to expanding the sciences and giving increased chances to poorer students. In 1893 the mighty Jowett had died, glad to have lived to interpret the ideas of Plato to the world, and Corpus itself, which up to 1850 had never had more than twenty undergraduates, had cautiously followed the times, and had expanded into Merton Street. The college remained small, all the members could be gathered at once on the secluded green lawn under the old mulberry tree, and the record of scholarship, as always, stood high.

      The idea that a son of Bishop Knox could be “frivolous and extravagant” did not cross Dr Fowler’s mind. But the President’s regulations, even by the standards which Edwardian Oxford tried to impose, were strict to excess. He had a horror of even the mildest forms of gambling, and imposed penalties on the undergraduates for playing the dreaded new game of “Bridge” and for attending the theatre in gowns “on the pretext that they thought the play was by Shakespeare”. Eddie could not conform. He stayed out late. The most difficult route for climbing in at night was across the wall from Merton, where the less agile were sometimes impaled on revolving iron spikes; he became an expert, only damaging his wrists during the last few feet when his friends dragged his light weight across the windowsill.

      With these friends, and in particular with Alan Barlow, later Secretary of the Treasury and Trustee of the National Gallery, Eddie passed golden hours. He was the unobtrusive wit of the dining clubs, organized races in hansom cabs, and introduced Miss Mabel Love, a music-hall performer, into the college. But he was aware of a document headed Communication to Mr E.V. Knox, Scholar, after complaints by the Tutors on his Idleness, and of the bitter disappointment that this was likely to cause at home. The summer of 1901 was spent at Glencrippsdale, where in the course of damp picnics and fishing expeditions Eddie fell into the melancholy which lay in wait for all the brothers. In an elegant version of the Greek Anthology, not the less true because it was a commonplace, he wrote,

      Leaf and bud, ah quick, how quick returning

      Here is visaged immortality;

      Freshly from the dark soil sunward yearning

      Lifts the ageless green; and must I die?

      The natural confidante for these moods would be a young woman, in this case a girl called Evelyn Stevenson, who was also staying at Glencrippsdale, a spirited creature who played billiards and tramped over the heather in an “artistically simple” outfit from Liberty’s. “Do you know, I actually read your letter right through?” she wrote to him. “Awfully good of me, wasn’t it? I hope you are taking a generally less gloomy view of life and things in general … it’s really easier than one thinks to go on living—at least it seems to me to be so.” She also advised him “not to get too clever”. But on his return to Oxford Dr Fowler informed him, in a spirit of anxious justice, that his scholarship had been suspended.

      To retrieve himself he must come back in September and take an examination on the whole of Herodotus and the whole of Plato’s Republic, with a fine to be paid if he did not pass, “which I fear would fall on your father rather than on yourself”—and Dr Fowler would be unable to supply him with testimonials of any kind. As a threat this would have had no effect on Eddie, but as an appeal to his affection it could and did. He gave up his “habitually late hours” (the records by now refer to him as “Mr Knox’s case”), spent only eightpence a week on bread and beer in Hall, and he passed his Honour Mods. A further letter from the Doctor recalls the pastoral atmosphere of Edwardian Oxford:

      Dear Mr Knox,

      I sincerely hope that our relations may be more pleasant in future, and that the discipline you have been under, and will continue to be under, in a modified form, this term, may turn out to be for your good, not only by teaching you the useful lessons of obedience and submission to authorities, but also by procuring for you more opportunities of reading undisturbed by callers, during the solitary hours in your rooms, as well as by leading you to reflect on, and I trust to repent of, the folly of some part of your conduct in the past.

      If all goes well for the rest of the term, I shall regard your present punishment and the spirit in which you have received it as purging your offences of the past, and, I trust, giving me the opportunity of speaking well of you to any one who may make enquiries as to your character.

      Those who were expected to make enquiries were the examiners for the Indian Civil Service, for which Eddie was destined. But now he knew—and, indeed, he had told Miss Stevenson—that he was going to be a writer, and one good enough to justify his choice of career to his father. He never took his final degree, but spent his last two years at Oxford training himself as a debater, essayist and poet by practising, as an apprentice has to do, in the styles he admired most—Swinburne, A. E. Housman, the young W. B. Yeats, the later George Meredith. Confined to his rooms by nine-fifteen every evening, he wrote alcaics:

      I am dumb to-night, I cannot sing your praises,

      Only feel this cool sweet-smelling silence,

      Between leaf-lattices, upward and upward …

      Wilfred was left stolidly behind at Rugby, working towards his turn for a scholarship. He was not very interested in school teams, and not very successful in getting prizes. But the placid exterior was deceptive, for Wilfred, like his brothers, had to come to terms with an inner struggle between reason and emotion, and between emotion and the obligation not to show it. From his letters it appears that his solution, for the time being, was a strange fantasy life entirely of his own devising. He refused to join the school debating society, “as if one who has spoken in all the Parliaments of Europe would condescend to speak at a petty school society!” When his box arrived and the Railway Company had demanded four shillings and ninepence he had “flung the minion out of the window for his presumptuous demands.” The heat had been appalling for October and during a rugby match several players melted into pools of water, drowning one of the onlookers, “a double tragedy which has cast СКАЧАТЬ