Each week the Pitt League posted up on the walls of the theatre a notice of the times and places of the various classes that were to be held. There were some six rooms at the disposal of this enterprising society. There was the attic at the top of Block I, a noisy room because the dramatic society would probably be found rehearsing next door; then there was the theatre, an impossible room; in the first place because it was too big, and in the second because the scenic artists behind the curtain carried on a continual dialogue to the tune of: “Where is that blue paint?” “Have you put up the wings?” “Where the hell’s the hammer?” which dialogue the scene-shifters accompanied with suitable crashes and landslides. It was a poor room for study—the

Image unavailable: THE BILLIARD ROOM AT MAINZ. [To face page 172.
THE BILLIARD ROOM AT MAINZ.
[To face page 172.

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theatre; and then there was the field officers’ dining-room—that was not too bad. But one window-pane was missing, and there was no heating apparatus, and the orderlies were always wanting to lay the plates; altogether there was not a superfluity of spare space; there was really only one decent room—the Alcove—and that was for one hour of the day allotted to the botanists and anatomists. For the rest of the time an agenda at the bottom of the Pitt League poster announced that “the Alcove was reserved for authors, architects and other students.”

The Alcove was a small room opening out of the billiard-room, and its possession by the “authors, architects and other students” was a privilege jealously guarded. Not that we ever resorted to force, the mere strength of personality was sufficient. A few acid epigrams drove the intruders away with the impression that after all there were lunatics in the camp. Only one man stayed for more than an hour, and that was Captain Frobisher,{174} a large, fat man who was doubtless an excellent soldier, but who was not an addition to a literary society that prided itself upon its exclusiveness. After all, when one is searching for a lost rhyme, or trying to make an honest scene sufficiently obscure to protect Canon Lyttelton’s delicate susceptibilities, it is disconcerting to have to listen to a conversation of this sort:—

“ ... And what do you think of the new offensive, Skipper?”

“Oh, we’ll wipe the swine off the face of the earth. I hope our men don’t take too many prisoners. There’s only one sort of Hun that’s any use, and that’s a dead one. Excreta, that’s all they are, excreta.... What I say is, smash ’em, and then when they’re down tread on ’em. That’s all they’re fit for. A good Hun is a dead Hun.”

Of course such rhetoric is excellent in its place, and in the mouth of a politician would appear as the supreme unction shed over the warring banners of humanity. But there are times....{175}

Frobisher must go. We all decided that. The only difficulty was that ... well, even in confinement one must show respect to a senior officer. It would have to be done with considerable tact; we could hardly approach him ourselves. We supposed that if he really wanted, he could defend himself on the ground that he was a student, a student of the philosophical interpretation of a dozen cocktails. But yet he had to go. And finally Stone undertook the job.

It took two bottles of Rhine wine to screw him up to the proper pitch, but we got him there at last; and nobly did he fulfil our trust. It was an unforgettable afternoon. Captain Frobisher was sitting at the middle table discussing over a bottle of wine his schemes for the entire destruction of the German race. The old saws were rolling smoothly from his tongue.

“We must let them have it; what I say is, starve them out, bomb their towns, confiscate their colonies; then make them{176} pay right up to the hilt, a crushing indemnity. They’d have done the same to us. An eye for an eye. That’s the principle we must work on, a tooth for a tooth.” Even a patriotic bishop could not have been more humanely vindictive.

And then we led in Stone.

He sat on the edge of the table nearest to the captain; his huge head of hair was flung back in a wild profusion, his shirt was open at the throat, he looked for all the world like a second Byron. And for the space of an hour he lectured on the higher life. As a testimony to the potency of the Rhine vintage, it was without parallel. It was a noble exposition.

He began with Schopenhauer; the jargon of metaphysics reeled into anacolutha: the absolute, the negation of the will; the thing in itself; phenomena, and the real. The mind was dazed with the conflicting theories of causation, and after each sounding peroration he recited in a crooning monotone the less cheerful musings of the Shropshire Lad;{177} while we, entering into his mood, gazed up at him with enraptured eyes, murmuring: “Delightful! Oh, delightful!”

Captain Frobisher fidgeted nervously on his form, he moved first to one extremity, then to another. Periodically he attempted a conversation with his companion; but every time he began, Stone broke into a state of fervour more than usually impassioned, and Frobisher’s attention was irresistibly drawn towards this strange creature who had emerged suddenly out of a world he did not know. Stone realised his traditional conception of the romantic poet, the long-haired, sprawling, effervescent creature that he had never seen, but that he had been told the war had killed. And here into the very centre of Mainz, into this home of militarism, was introduced the loathsome atmosphere of Paris and the Café Royal, this unpleasant reincarnation of the hectic nineties.

For an hour he stood it, and then Stone arrived at the point to which all his previous{178} eloquence had led. “I don’t know,” he said, “I have thought it out for a long time, but I am still uncertain as to which of all the collective emotions has done most harm, has wrought most damage to the suffering individual. Once I thought it was religion, religion with its bigotry and ritual, its confessional and chains; but during the last four years I have been sorely tempted—sorely tempted, my dear Waugh—to believe that of all the evils that can befall a community, there is none worse than the scourge of Patriotism.”

It was the limit, beyond which even the endurance of a soldier could not pass. Captain Frobisher threw at Stone one glance charged with distrust, and strode from the room. He never entered it again; and the “authors, architects and other students” were able to return to earth, and become once more respectable citizens.

Of the architects and other students we saw very little. Occasionally a linguist would drift in with a conversation grammar{179} and a notebook, and sometimes a financier would draw up tables of expenditure and loss, but on the whole the Alcove was the property of “Wordsmiths.”

There were about five of us in all, and as soon as appel was over we used to proceed towards the billiard-room laden with pens and paper. At this early hour there were usually not more than three of us, as Tarrant and Stone preferred to take breakfast at a later hour; but Milton Hayes was invariably to be found there, embellishing lyrics, or putting the final touches to his musical comedy, and in the intervals of production expounding his latest ?sthetic theories.

A vivid contrast was presented by Tarrant and Stone. With popular taste they were both equally unconcerned. Relative merit interested them not at all; their standards were deep-laid and inelastic.

Tarrant usually appeared in the Alcove at about one o’clock, and observed a ritual that would with any one else have savoured of affectation, but was with him perfectly{180} natural. Nature had endowed him with generous proportions, more built for comfort than for speed; and he accentuated the natural roll of his gait by his strange footwear. A pair of field boots had been abbreviated into shoes by the camp cobbler in such a way as to admit of the insertion of two fingers between the leather and the instep. To keep them on his feet as he walked, Tarrant had to resort to a straddle that was one of the features of camp life. And as he entered he bulked largely in the door of the Alcove, marvellously shod, carrying under one arm a dictionary, a notebook and a Thesaurus, and over the other a cardigan waistcoat and a green velvet scarf.

He flung his books noisily on the table and then proceeded to array himself for the ardours of composition. He first of all divested himself of his collar and tie, and wrapped round his throat the green velvet scarf, that would have lain more appropriately as a stole on the shoulders of an ecclesiastic than it did as a muffler on those of a{181} Gefangener, engaged on a psychological study of seduction. Tarrant then removed his tunic, disclosing a woollen waistcoat, over which he proceeded to draw the second woollen coat that he had brought with him. He explained that they brought him physical ease.

“You see, old man,” he said, “it’s not much use my mind being free, if my limbs are encased in even the loosest of military tunics.”

He then proceeded to work.

Every writer, of course, has his own particular foible, and Tarrant’s was an appalling accuracy in gauging the exact number of words that he had written. Most writers are quite content to add up the number of lines in a page, then find the average number of words in a line and multiply. But Tarrant would have none of these slipshod methods.

“On that principle,” he said, “I suppose you’d call a line a line whether it goes right across the page or not?”

“Yes,” I confessed.{182}

He gave a grunt of contempt.

“And then you say The Loom of Youth is 110,000 words l............