Hare Sitting Up

Part I

Juniper

Chapter One

Juniper had been to Oxford to attend a conference of headmasters of preparatory schools. It was the middle of the long vacation, and he hadn’t expected to see many undergraduates. But now, just as his train was about to move out of the station, half a dozen of them tumbled into his compartment. He would have their company non-stop to Paddington. It would be rather a squash.

Actually, there were only five: three men and two girls. As one of the men swung his suitcase up on the rack Juniper noticed that it had been hastily packed. There was the toe of a black sock hanging out at one end, and a scrap of white fur at the other. Of course, the scrap of white fur explained matters. It couldn’t be anything but a BA hood. These young people were not undergraduates. They were graduates—of perhaps a couple of hours standing. This was a Degree Day, and with hundreds of others who had lately passed their final examinations they had come up for a graduation ceremony. Three young men and two young women. All with their careers before them.

Juniper found himself taking a deep breath. He hadn’t much cared for the conference; he wasn’t in very good spirits; he was fifty-two. And now here was all this vitality and eagerness crowded round him. Merely as a spectator of it, he had to brace himself by taking this deep breath. Curiously enough, as the train jerked forward, the young man sitting opposite Juniper found it necessary to do precisely the same thing. He took positively a gulp of air.

Well! the young man said, —goodbye to all that.

But it still goes on, remember. The reply came from a ginger-haired and freckled youth sitting next to Juniper. Chaps sweating through their last long vac now. Hungry generations, getting ready to tread us down. Twelve months, Toby my boy, and they’ll be after the same jobs that we are.

Toby stretched out long legs on each side of Juniper’s ankles. My dear Arthur, he said comfortably, you and I can go a long way in twelve months.

And so can the world. A dark young man sitting in the corner diagonally opposite to Juniper looked up from a book he had opened to offer this. Take comfort from that, when you get in a bloody panic job-hunting. He glanced at the girl sitting next to him. Sorry, he added conventionally.

The girl looked at him in silent scorn. She clearly regarded the habit of apologising for feeble bad language as beneath contempt. The second girl, who was sitting on the other side of the ginger-haired Arthur, so that Juniper could see nothing of her for the moment except that she was wearing one bright yellow stocking and one bright green, seemed to judge it necessary to bridge an awkward gap. Gavin, she said—apparently meaning the dark young man, gets these apocalyptic feelings. There’s nothing in them. The great world rolls for ever down the ringing grooves of change. But far more groove than change.

"Plus ça change, plus c’est la mênu chose."

The comfortable Toby had produced this. It elicited gasps of ironical admiration all round. Juniper realised that all his travelling companions were acquainted with each other, and that they would probably chatter on like this throughout the journey. It might be quite fun. He had nothing to read except a pamphlet which he had picked up at his conference, and which he hadn’t much expectation of finding absorbing. But he had better keep his nose in it. If he was felt to be an outsider listening, the talkers might become self-conscious and dry up. Arthur had already given him a sharply considering glance. So Juniper managed a frown of concentration over the blur of print in front of him.

And now the girl to whom Gavin had so ineptly apologised spoke crisply. But some rather basic things do change. Things that have remained constant for hundreds of years have changed quite a lot between last year and this year. It’s rather striking, really.

Do you mean Alice’s stockings? Toby asked. They’re striking—and quite charming. And I suppose they haven’t been happening quite like that since the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Elegant pages in Perugino or Pintoricchio. Terribly nice.

The girl called Alice, who might have been expected to tuck her legs modestly beneath her at this assault, merely leant forward and scratched her own brightly clothed ankles. Jean means nothing of the sort, she said. She means bombs and things.

Oh, bombs! Toby sat back as if withdrawing from the talk.

Probably I might have said things that have remained constant for millions of years, not just for hundreds. The brisk Jean was entirely serious. Take elks.

Elks? Gavin said. Some sort of American freemasons?

I mean real elks, particularly in the north of Sweden. The radioactivity in their bones is up by 200 per cent. Contaminated pastures. If Gavin gets apocalyptic feelings, I think he’s entitled to them.

Isn’t it all exaggerated? Toby asked, as if with a return of mild interest.

Not so much exaggerated as tricky. The ginger-haired Arthur was now as serious as Jean. Or that’s what our Provost tells me. And he’s in on radiation, all right. Chief scientific adviser, in fact, to Euratom’s health division.

There was an impressed silence. Juniper let his pamphlet drop into his lap. These young people were now interesting him very much.

And what does your Provost say? Alice asked.

He says that you have to be damned careful what you say. A scare headline in a national paper might persuade thousands of people that it was dangerous to give their babies milk. And public agitation, if it got out of hand, might cripple a government in effective international negotiation.

To hell with that, anyway, Toby said.

Gavin nodded his dark head. Yes, to hell with that.

And Arthur nodded too. Well, there I agree with you. I’m all for crippling the bastards if they can be crippled. But can they? Not by protest marches, and being a nuisance to bobbies outside research establishments, and all that stuff.

But isn’t what you call ‘all that stuff’ the only thing we have to chuck at them? Jean asked. It’s like fighting with bottles, I quite agree. But bottles are better than nothing.

"Certainly they are. But our Provost says another thing about popular agitation. It can do all sorts of mischief just by getting its facts half wrong. Suppose that the strontium rate in grass, or in your elks, Jean, goes bumping up sharply just after the Russians have done a series of experiments. Everybody starts shouting that the experiments have been dirty—dirty in the technical sense, that is. And the Russians say No, not at all, they were frightfully careful to make them as clean as clean. At that we all start shouting—those of us that aren’t party-line boys—that Russians are frightful great liars. This might happen, you see, just at a time when there was some chance of a thaw and a general gleam of sense all round. Which would be a disaster. And it would be happening because we hadn’t stopped to collect our scientific facts—all our scientific facts. You see, the strontium percentage bumps up and down for other reasons besides bomb tests. Wet weather or dry is quite enough to set the hypersensitive instruments that measure such things swinging one way or the other."

The well-informed Arthur paused. There was another—and this time rather baffled—silence. Then Jean thought of a relevant question. How old is this Provost of yours? she asked.

Sixty-nine. He retires next year.

"Well; that’s him, Alice said with decision. They just don’t, at that sort of age, know what it’s all about."

Does he, Toby asked mildly, have a stroke every now and then?

Or have the surgeons, Gavin added, been obliged to excise the softer bits of his brain?

Oh, shut up, Arthur said crossly. We’ll all be that age one day.

Shall we? Jean asked. I’d say that’s rather the point.

Well, anyway, they’re not decent—personalities like that. Our Provost may have reaction-times like a hearse, but he does ask one to lunch.

We can certainly drop him, Gavin said tolerantly. He does no harm in your blessed college, and probably not much on Euratom either. But he’s a symptom of something pretty grim, you’ll agree. Our fathers, when they were our age, declaimed against government by the grey-haired. But they didn’t have to declaim against government by near-corpses. In those days, the really disabling diseases killed fairly quickly. Nowadays, you can have a man sitting at a conference table when there’s pretty well nothing left of him except will and judgement. And will can last longer even than judgement in a mortally sick man.

That’s thoroughly true.

This time, the silence was a startled one. For it was Juniper who had spoken. He hadn’t in the least meant to.

It was the ginger-headed Arthur—he who had already looked curiously at Juniper—who spoke first. He spoke to the accompaniment of a surprisingly sheepish grin, and to an entirely unexpected effect. Hullo, sir. I’m afraid we’ve been failing to recognise each other.

For a moment Juniper stared at him blankly. Then he laughed. Well, I’m blessed, he said. It’s—

Arthur Ferris, ’44 to ’48. The ginger-haired youth spoke quickly, in case his former headmaster should in fact be baffled. The worst mathematician you ever got into Rugby, sir.

"I doubt that Did you overlap with Bingo Parker? Probably not. But the surgeons had certainly been at his brain—in his first childhood and not his second—and taken out the bit with sums in it."

Everybody laughed politely. Since the stranger had joined in their conversation, they felt that this was the thing to do. Probably they were a little sorry for Arthur, who had been gassing away, with this elderly beak of his beside him all the time. It was perhaps because Juniper was aware of this that he hastened a return to the former general topic.

I was saying I thought you right about will and judgement. One can never confidently trust the judgement of a very sick man. The will may crack much later.

Then isn’t it odd, sir, Toby asked politely, that what happens nowadays isn’t more disastrous than it is? Really important people seem to be kept alive in the most fantastic way. And their judgement can’t be—it can’t possibly be—what it was. They dominate contending nations—and yet here we are, alive, and the world at peace, more or less, and nobody killing anybody else except in quite obscure corners of it.

Juniper nodded. He guessed that intelligence lurked in the easy-going Toby. Perhaps, he said, will is more important than judgement—up at that level. It can’t find solutions, but it can block the way. Sit at a table opposite to an absolutely inflexible will and—if you’re an absolutely inflexible will yourself—the probable outcome will be just nothing at all. And there’s no harm in that. It’s budging or being budged that may be fatal.

The serious Jean sat up straight. Juniper could see at once that she was what they call father-eclipsed. Either she had to crumple before an elderly man or react against him vigorously. You mean, she asked, that we should see to it that near-corpses negotiate with near-corpses, and that they need have neither wits in their heads nor compassion in their bowels as long as their jaws set like rat-traps?

Juniper hesitated for a moment. He was aware that the other young people had become slightly uncomfortable. They were all capable of being serious—indeed they liked seriousness—but they hated a hint of any sort of emotional overtone to all this. And before he could frame a reply, the multi-coloured Alice again took on the role of smoothing things over.

But if you don’t budge and he doesn’t budge, she said, then you will both go on manufacturing those ghastly things. And bankrupting yourselves in the process. For the expense is astronomical, isn’t it?

Certainly it is. Juniper followed this up briskly. Killing people gets more and more expensive century by century, and war by war. And when you break down the cost of nuclear fission you get some quite fantastic results. Advertising vacant appointments, for instance. Getting the right man for a moderately senior job often costs £8,ooo that way alone.

Arthur Ferris laughed. It would be bad if getting an assistant master cost that, sir.

My dear Ferris, I’d regard it as a facer if it cost a thousandth part of it. Even for somebody who can teach mathematics with an eye on Rugby—and I assure you they’re much the hardest to get hold of.

And it could all be spent on medical research, Alice said. Or on getting millions of people in what Toby calls obscure corners of the world up at least to something near the bread line.

They’d only breed faster, Gavin said.

That’s where medical research would come in. Alice hesitated for a fraction of a second. Contraception’s no good as it is—not among primitive peoples. But if you can manage it orally, the old Malthusian nightmare is solved.

Everybody started talking at once. And Juniper, who knew that his nerves hadn’t been too good of late, was suddenly aware that he was almost in a queer way. For, quite out of the blue, he felt affection for these young people—and felt guilty about them too. He liked the small boys at Splaine Croft—he just wouldn’t be there if he didn’t—but the shades of their prison house were still far off. These young men and women were, so to speak, just ready to be tumbled in. For a still moment, while the chatter ran on, Juniper sat back and wondered what fool or blackguard had made the world into which the tumbling must be done.

It was Toby’s voice that brought him back to an awareness of the course of the argument. So, if people must be killed, Toby was saying, there’s everything to be said for doing the job cheaply. It comes to that. Back to Tamburlaine and Genghis Khan.

But there’s also much to be said for doing it with discrimination, Juniper said. High explosive wasn’t too bad there. If you dropped it from Zeppelins—he paused for a moment, wondering if any of his hearers would be very clear about what a Zeppelin was—or torpedoed it into a passenger liner, you were at least still more or less taking aim. And even if you blockaded a whole nation, you presumably knew what you were about—if that indeed can be called knowledge, which is, presumably, unaccompanied by imaginative realisation. He paused again, aware that there was a real stillness in the railway compartment. "But the hydrogen bomb is, of course, quite simply madness. It’s spectacularly effective—just as would be some contrivance for ensuring that the earth should fall into the sun. It’s indiscriminate to that degree. We bankrupt ourselves, as one of you said, to manufacture something which must destroy us if put into use. So cheap ways of indiscriminate slaughter would be a little more rational. And cheap ways of very large-scale but yet controllable slaughter would be more rational still. A relative rationality, of course. Considering the whole thing entirely as an inside job."

There was silence. An inside job? somebody asked.

Inside the madhouse. My generation are all inside. We’re trapped into making all our calculations as if an outside didn’t exist. Your generation has the job of breaking out, wouldn’t you say?

Certainly we have. Toby stretched his long legs farther on each side of Juniper’s shoes. He had the appearance of being very relaxed. But we need to get the know-how. A hint or two, say. And I take it you don’t mean, sir, that your own generation is entitled simply to abdicate responsibility?

Certainly not. But I’m afraid I’m being a bore. Juniper suddenly felt so tired that he wanted to get out of the whole conversation. It’s not really stuff for a schoolmaster to pontificate about.

You seemed to have some specialised knowledge, the dark Gavin said abruptly. Those £8,000 advertisements, for instance.

Juniper smiled. It’s very indirect. A sort of family connection.

We may all have that, in a manner of speaking. Arthur Ferris spoke after having remained silent for some time. "I don’t know whether you heard us joking about job hunting. Well, we can’t tell where any job will land us. Whether we’ve read Arts or Science, some vast industrial concern is quite likely to suck us