"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got no use for decency."

We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and tolerating att.i.tude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or think--even think! until it leads to our coming to--to the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "--he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air--"oh, a confounded b.u.t.tered slide of sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more daylight than I do at present.

I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out into the world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sn.i.g.g.e.ring a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like--like Cambridge humorists.... I mean to know what I'm doing."

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one is apt to forget one's own share in a talk, I find, more than one does the clear-cut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was developed. It was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there were really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to other people's.

"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind even is broken in to run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to be able to think of anything.

And 'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of Us. If we see fit, that is."

A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected.

"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are we up here for? Instead of working in mines? If some things aren't to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good G.o.d! what do you think a university's for?"...

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emanc.i.p.ation to several of us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great elucidation.

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of s.e.x. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for the inst.i.tution of marriage. The fine dim night-time s.p.a.ces of the Great Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hot-eared wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their particular a.s.sociations for me with that spate of confession and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and c.r.a.ppled and sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough in Suss.e.x, where there is a fishing inn and a river that goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed and talked of being h.e.l.lenic and the beauty of the body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to restore the Golden Age, by the simple abolition of tailors and outfitters.

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in our seething minds!

We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was gloriously red. "My G.o.d!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My G.o.d!"

Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot now imagine why. She was "like a tender G.o.ddess," Benton said. A sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we pa.s.sed a girl in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one exception to the ba.n.a.l decency, the sickly pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in which we lived?

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this same emanc.i.p.ation returns to those ancient courts beside the Cam.

We were the anti-decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our rooms much as if they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for in the slightest degree....

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our more formal university work, for most of us took firsts, and three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself who both became Residential Fellows. I had taken the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.

2

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of undergraduate life. We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with an appet.i.te for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate men who made up the ma.s.s of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these others extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a similar weakness in these our brothers.

There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a type--I'm a little doubtful at times now whether after all we didn't create it--for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky d.i.n.kys," intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky d.i.n.ky summarised all that we particularly did not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded becoming.

But it is hard to convey the Pinky d.i.n.ky idea, for all that it meant so much to us. We spent one evening at least during that reading party upon the Pinky d.i.n.ky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the rain--it was our only wet day--smoked our excessively virile pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky d.i.n.ky. We improvised a sort of Pinky d.i.n.ky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the responses.

"The Pinky d.i.n.ky extracts a good deal of amus.e.m.e.nt from life," said some one.

"d.a.m.ned prig!" said Hatherleigh.

"The Pinky d.i.n.ky arises in the Union and treats the question with a light gay touch. He makes the weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go on because of the amus.e.m.e.nt he extracts."

"I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said Hatherleigh.

"The Pinky d.i.n.ky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all being frightfully funny. It's time for you to say something now.'"

"The Pinky d.i.n.ky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be a responsible being.' And he really IS frivolous."

"Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer.

"Pinky d.i.n.kys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said Hatherleigh.

"They're Plebs and they know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to carry it off."...

We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured.

Pinky d.i.n.kys are due to over-production of the type that ought to keep outfitters' shops. Pinky d.i.n.kys would like to keep outfitters' shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and not be sn.o.bs to customers, no!--not even if they had t.i.tles."

"Every Pinky d.i.n.ky's people are rather good people, and better than most Pinky d.i.n.ky's people. But he does not put on side."

"Pinky d.i.n.kys become playful at the sight of women."

"'Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky d.i.n.ky, and felt a man condescended."

"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump into bottomless despair.

We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the Pinky d.i.n.ky.

We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky d.i.n.ky goes to King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the dusk. Solemn things! Oh HUSH! He wouldn't tell you--"

"He COULDN'T tell you."

"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"

"But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the Pinky d.i.n.ky has a doubt--"

Some one protested.

"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly what one would call good form....

There's a lot of horrid coa.r.s.eness got into the world somehow. SOMEBODY put it there.... And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man should be seen about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all that--"

"The Pinky d.i.n.ky for all his fun and levity has a clean mind."

"A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's--the Pig!"

"If once he began to think about s.e.x, how could he be comfortable at croquet?"

"It's their d.a.m.ned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's what's the matter with the Pinky d.i.n.ky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the job! How the Devil is a great Empire to be run with men like him?"

"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on the fender, "it's just a nervous sn.i.g.g.e.ring--because he's afraid....

Oxford's no better."

"What's he afraid of?" said I.

"G.o.d knows!" exploded Hatherleigh and stared at the fire.