"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 God! what do you think a university's for?"...
Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation 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 sex.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 institution of marriage.The fine dim night-time spaces 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 associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.
And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough in Sussex, 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 Hellenic 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 God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!
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 goddess," Benton said.Asort 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 passed 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 banal 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 emancipation 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 Idisinterred 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 appetite 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 mass 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 Dinkys,"intending thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure.The Pinky Dinky 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.
