432
PARTISAN REVIEW
My snobbery left me lonely in a small college which con·
tained comparatively few public schoolboys and still fewer 'intel–
lectuals.' The person I liked best was my 'scout'-the servant who
brought me my meals and supposedly made my bed. He was a tiny
elf, seventy years old, with a greasy howler hat, a thick moustache
and a chuckle; he was always telling me stories which were built up
carefully to a climax; when the climax came he would shut himself
out of the room, timing the bang of the door to endorse his wit. He
used to romanticize about the landscape of Devonshire-'dead red
cows on dead green grass'-and had seen the moon under an arch
at Tintem Abbey. Like most college servants he was a money snob
and liked to see people entertaining, used the word 'gentleman'
very often and thought that the old days were better-the days
when the Warden was the
Honorable
Brodrick and the future Lord
Birkenhead, being tutor of History, got drunk every night and hung
up his trousers over the pictures on the wall. Both of them real
gentlemen. When my scout heard that my sister was becoming a
doctor he said: 'Funny thing that, sir, the way brains runs in fam·
ilies.' 'Like wooden legs' he added and shut the door on himself
with a bang and a chuckle. He was very charming but a parody;
Oxford with its Fellows and scouts and tradespeople is as full of
walking parodies as any Anglo-Indian club. Nature in England has
a way of imitating
Punch.
The servants varied from college to college. In Magdalen and
Christ Church the scouts were like Hollywood manorial butlers;
in
the more plebeian colleges they were often like caricatures by
Rowlandson of innkeepers or ostlers. Under the scouts in all col–
leges there was a host of menials, many of them badly paid. A sur–
prising number of these looked half-witted; their features were
often wildly haphazard, their bloodshot eyes splodged askew on
their faces, their mouths unable to shut, hair growing out of their
ears. Some of them were lobster-red from drink, others decayed
as if from centuries of malnutrition. Their gait too was abnormal–
slouching or walking crab-wise, cow-hocked or bandy or sagging
at the knees. Like an inbred race apart-superannuated relics of
the Dickensian tavern or poorhouse, apes in green baize aprons.
And oozing out of them all a traditional automatic sycophancy-a
leering, smug, half imbecile, half cunning, self-abasing conscious-
