Eyeless In Gaza (10 page)

The bell came nearer and nearer, ploughing through the deep warm drifts of sleep, until at last it hammered remorselessly on his naked and quivering consciousness. Anthony opened his eyes. What a filthy row it made! But he needn't think of getting up for at least another five minutes. The warmth under the sheets was heavenly. Then – and it spoilt everything – he remembered that early school was algebra with Jimbug. His heart came into his throat. Those awful quadratics! Jimbug would start yelling at him again. It wasn't fair. And he'd blub. But then it occurred to him that Jimbug probably wouldn't yell at him today – because of what, he suddenly remembered, had happened yesterday. Horse-Face had been most awfully decent last night, he went on to think.

But it was time to get up. One, two, three and, ugh, how filthily cold it was! He was just diving upwards into his shirt when somebody tapped very softly at the door of his cubicle. One last wriggle brought his head through into daylight. He went and opened. Staithes was standing in the passage. Staithes – grinning, it was true, in apparent friendliness; but still . . . Anthony was disturbed. Mistrustfully, but with a hypothetical smile of welcome, ‘What's up?' he began; but the other put a finger to his lips.

‘Come and look,' he whispered. ‘It's marvellous!'

Anthony was flattered by this invitation from one who, as captain of the football eleven, had a right to be, and generally was, thoroughly offensive to him. He was afraid of Staithes and disliked him – and for that very reason felt particularly pleased that Staithes should have taken the trouble to come to him like this, of his own accord . . .

Staithes's cubicle was already crowded. The conspiratorial silence seethed and bubbled with a suppressed excitement. Thompson had had to stuff his handkerchief into his mouth to keep himself from laughing, and Pembroke-Jones was doubling up in paroxysms of noiseless mirth. Wedged in the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wash-stand, Partridge was standing with one cheek pressed against the partition. Staithes touched him on the shoulder. Partridge turned round and came out into the centre of the cubicle; his freckled face was distorted with glee and he twitched and fidgeted as though his bladder were bursting. Staithes pointed to the place he had vacated and Anthony squeezed in. A knot in the wood of the partition had been prized out, and through the hole you could see all that was going on in the next cubicle. On the bed, wearing only a woollen undervest and his rupture appliance, lay Goggler Ledwidge. His eyes behind the thick glass of his spectacles were shut; his lips were parted. He looked tranquilly happy and serene, as though he were in church.

‘Is he still there?' whispered Staithes.

Anthony turned a grinning face and nodded; then pressed his eyes more closely to the spy-hole. What made it so specially funny was the fact that it should be Goggler – Goggler, the school buffoon, the general victim, predestined by weakness and timidity to inevitable persecution. This would be something new to bait him with.

‘Let's give him a fright,' suggested Staithes, and climbed up on to the rail at the head of the bed.

Partridge, who played centre forward for the first eleven, made a movement to follow him. But it was to Anthony that Staithes unexpectedly turned. ‘Come on, Beavis,' he whispered. ‘Come up here with me.' He wanted to be specially decent to the poor chap – because of his mater. Besides, it pleased him to be able to snub that lout, Partridge.

Anthony accepted the flattering invitation with an almost abject alacrity and got up beside him. The others perched unsteadily at the foot of the bed. At a signal from Staithes all straightened themselves up and, showing their heads above the partition, hooted their derision.

Recalled thus brutally from his squalidly tender little Eden of enemas and spankings (it had, as yet, no female inhabitants), Goggler gave vent to a startled cry; his eyes opened, frantic with terror; he went very white for a moment, then blushed. With his two hands he pulled down his vest; but it was too short to cover his nakedness or even his truss. Absurdly short, like a baby's vest. (‘We'll try to make them last this one more term,' his mother had said. ‘These woollen things are so frightfully expensive.' She had made great sacrifices to send him to Bulstrode.)

‘Pull, pull!' Staithes shouted in sarcastic encouragement of his efforts.

‘Why wouldn't Henry VIII allow Anne Boleyn to go into his henhouse?' said Thompson. Everyone knew the answer, of course. There was a burst of laughter.

Staithes lifted one foot from its perch, pulled off the leather-soled slipper, took aim and threw. It hit Goggler on the side of his face. He gave a cry of pain, jumped out of bed and stood with hunched shoulders and one skinny little arm raised to cover his head, looking up at the jeering faces through eyes that had begun to overflow with tears.

‘Buzz yours too!' shouted Staithes to the others. Then, seeing the new arrival standing in the open doorway of his cubicle, ‘Hullo, Horse-Face,' he said, as he took off the other slipper; ‘come and have a shot.' He raised his arm; but before he could throw, Horse-Face had jumped on to the bed and caught him by the wrist.

‘No, s-stop!' he said. ‘Stop.' And he caught also at Thompson's arm. Leaning over Staithes's shoulder, Anthony
threw – as hard as he could. Goggler ducked. The slipper thumped against the wooden partition behind him.

‘B-beavis!' cried Horse-Face – so reproachfully, that Anthony felt a sudden twinge of shame.

‘It didn't hit him,' he said, by way of excuse; and for some queer reason found himself thinking of that horrible deep hole in Lollingdon churchyard.

Staithes had found his tongue again. ‘I don't know what you think you're doing, Horse-Face,' he said angrily, and jerked the slipper out of Brian's hand. ‘Why can't you mind your own business?'

‘It isn't f-fair,' Brian answered.

‘Yes, it is.'

‘F-five against one.'

‘But you don't know what he was doing.'

‘I d-don't c-c-c . . . don't m-mind.'

‘You would care, if you knew,' said Staithes; and proceeded to tell him what Goggler had been doing – as dirtily as he knew how.

Brian dropped his eyes and his cheeks went suddenly very red. To have to listen to smut always made him feel miserable – miserable and at the same time ashamed of himself.

‘Look at old Horse-Face blushing!' called Partridge; and they all laughed – none more derisively than Anthony. For Anthony had had time to feel ashamed of his shame; time to refuse to think about that hole in Lollingdon churchyard; time, too, to find himself all of a sudden almost hating old Horse-Face. ‘For being so disgustingly pi,' he would have said, if somebody had asked him to explain his hatred. But the real reason was deeper, obscurer. If he hated Horse-Face, it was because Horse-Face had the courage of convictions which Anthony felt should also be
his
convictions – which, indeed, would be his convictions if only he could bring himself to have the courage of them. It was just because he liked
Horse-Face so much, that he now hated him. Or, rather, because there were so many reasons why he should like him – so few reasons, on the contrary, why Horse-Face should return the liking. Horse-Face was rich with all sorts of fine qualities that he himself either lacked completely, or else, which was worse, possessed, but somehow was incapable of manifesting. That sudden derisive burst of laughter was the expression of a kind of envious resentment against a superiority which he loved and admired. Indeed, the love and the admiration in some sort produced the resentment and the envy – produced, but ordinarily kept them below the surface in an unconscious abeyance, from which, however, some crisis like the present would suddenly call them.

‘You should have seen him,' concluded Staithes. Now that he felt in a better humour he laughed – he could afford to laugh.

‘In his truss,' Anthony added, in a tone of sickened contempt. Goggler's rupture was an aggravation of the offence.

‘Yes, in his beastly old truss!' Staithes confirmed approvingly. There was no doubt about it; combined as it was with the spectacles and the timidity, that truss made the throwing of slippers not only inevitable, but right, a moral duty.

‘He's disgusting,' Anthony went on, warming pleasantly to his righteous indignation.

For the first time since Staithes had started on his description of Goggler's activities Brian looked up. ‘B-but w-why is he more disg-gusting than anyone else?' he asked in a low voice. ‘A-after all,' he went on, and the blood came rushing back into his cheeks as he spoke, ‘he i-isn't the . . . the o-only one.'

There was a moment's uncomfortable silence. Of course he wasn't the only one. But he was the only one, they were all
thinking, who had a truss, and goggles, and a vest that was too short for him; the only one who did it in broad daylight and let himself be caught at it. There
was
a difference.

Staithes counter-attacked on another front. ‘Sermon by the Reverend Horse-Face!' he said jeeringly, and at once recovered the initiative, the position of superiority. ‘Gosh!' he added in another tone, ‘it's late. We must buck up.'

From A. B.'s diary.

CONDITIONED REFLEX
.
WHAT
a lot of satisfaction I got out of old Pavlov when first I read him. The ultimate de-bunking of all human pretensions. We were all dogs and bitches together. Bow-wow, sniff the lamp-post, lift the leg, bury the bone. No nonsense about free will, goodness, truth and all the rest. Each age has its psychological revolutionaries. La Mettrie, Hume, Condillac, and finally the Marquis de Sade, latest and most sweeping of the eighteenth-century de-bunkers. Perhaps, indeed, the ultimate and absolute revolutionary. But few have the courage to follow the revolutionary argument to Sade's conclusions. Meanwhile, science did not stand still.
Dix-huitième
de-bunking, apart from Sade, proved inadequate. The nineteenth century had to begin again. Marx and the Darwinians. Who are still with us – Marx obsessively so. Meanwhile the twentieth century has produced yet another lot of de-bunkers – Freud and, when he began to flag, Pavlov and the Behaviourists. Conditioned reflex: – it seemed, I remember, to put the lid on everything. Whereas actually, of course, it merely restated the doctrine of free will. For if
reflexes can be conditioned, then, obviously, they can be re-conditioned. Learning to use the self properly, when one has been using it badly – what is it but re-conditioning one's reflexes?

Lunched with my father. More cheerful than I've seen him recently, but old and, oddly, rather enjoying it. Making much of getting out of his chair with difficulty, of climbing very slowly up the stairs. A way, I suppose, of increasing his sense of importance. Perhaps also a way of commanding sympathy whenever he happens to want it. Baby cries so that mother shall come and make a fuss of him. It goes on from the cradle to the grave. Miller says of old age that it's largely a bad habit. Use conditions function. Walk about as if you were a martyr to rheumatism and you'll impose such violent muscular strains upon yourself that a martyr to rheumatism you'll really be. Behave like an old man and your body will function like an old man's, you'll think and feel as an old man. The lean and slippered pantaloon – literally a part that one plays. If you refuse to play it and learn how to act on your refusal, you won't become a pantaloon. I suspect this is largely true. Anyhow, my father is playing his present part with gusto. One of the great advantages of being old, provided that one's economic position is reasonably secure and one's health not too bad, is that one can afford to be serene. The grave is near, one has made a habit of not feeling anything very strongly; it's easy, therefore, to take the God's-eye view of things. My father took it about peace, for example. Yes, men were made, he agreed; there would be another war quite soon – about 1940, he thought. (A date, significantly, when he was practically certain to be dead!) Much worse than the last war, yes; and would probably destroy the civilization of Western Europe. But did it really matter so much? Civilization would go on in other continents, would built itself up anew in the devastated areas. Our time scale was all wrong. We should
think of ourselves, not as living in the thirties of the twentieth century, but as at a point between two ice ages. And he ended up by quoting Goethe –
alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichniss
. All which is doubtless quite true, but not the whole truth. Query: how to combine belief that the world is to a great extent illusory with belief that it is none the less essential to improve the illusion? How to be simultaneously dispassionate and not indifferent, serene like an old man and active like a young one?

‘THESE VILE HORSE-FLIES!'
Helen rubbed the reddening spot on her arm. Anthony made no comment. She looked at him for a little in silence. ‘What a lot of ribs you've got!' she said at last.

‘Schizothyme physique,' he answered from behind the arm with which he was shielding his face from the light. ‘That's why I'm here. Predestined by the angle of my ribs.'

‘Predestined to what?'

‘To sociology; and in the intervals to this.' He raised his hand, made a little circular gesture and let it fall again on the mattress.

‘But what's “this?”' she insisted.

‘This?' Anthony repeated. ‘Well . . .' He hesitated. But it would take too long to talk about that temperamental divorce between the passions and the intellect, those detached sensualities, those sterilized ideas. ‘Well,
you
,' he brought out at last.

‘Me?'

‘Oh, I admit it might have been someone else,' he said, and laughed, genuinely amused by his own cynicism.