Hare Sitting Up Read Free Page A

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 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 specialized knowledge,’ the dark Gavin said abruptly. ‘Those £8,000 advertisements, for instance.’
    Juniper smiled. ‘It’s very indirect. A sort of family connexion.’
    ‘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 in. That’s true even of the women–’
    ‘Thank you,’ Alice interrupted with spirit. ‘Although the probability is that we shall become governesses, no doubt.’
    ‘Don’t trail feminist red herrings, Alice dear. I’m saying we’re all liable to be sucked into concerns which have what you may call close family relationships with slaughter. There’s no escaping it.’
    ‘You can teach,’ Juniper said – and knew he said it a little stiffly. ‘Not much money. But you can teach in a decent school. I’ll get any of you a job tomorrow.’
    ‘But what if we taught sedition?’ Toby asked cheerfully. ‘Or, if not sedition, at least thoroughly subversive ideas? What if we marched the kids to one of those atom-busting places, and urged them to lie down and bite the bobbies in the calves? It might be keeping schoolmastering going as an honourable profession, if you ask me. But what would the parents say? And what would happen to the fees?’
    ‘What indeed,’ Juniper said, and let his tone indicate his disinclination to pursue this line.
    ‘I’m much more interested,’ Gavin said at once, ‘in something else. It’s the twilight of the gods idea – the fascination of bringing everything else down with you as you fall. Hitler was gripped by that, I imagine. But you needn’t necessarily be a Wagnerite to feel the tug of it.’
    Alice crossed a green leg over a yellow one. ‘Death-wish stuff,’ she said. ‘How does it correlate with actually dying? Does anybody know? You see, we’ve been talking about the dangers of concentrating power – and far more potential destructive power than has ever existed before – in the hands of old, sick men. Suppose they’re dying because they want to die–’
    ‘Which is very great rot to begin with,’ Toby interrupted cheerfully.
    ‘But I’m just trying to keep an open mind. Would there really be any tendency in an old, sick man – an unconscious tendency, I mean – to take the whole outfit with him?’
    For a moment everybody considered this problem soberly. And again Juniper found himself strangely moved – this time, just by the silence. The thought of these young people didn’t perhaps go very deep. But they were applying what information they had – including some surprisingly old-fashioned psychological conceptions – to problems that were very real to them. And to him.
    ‘I don’t believe in your fatal old men,’ Arthur said. ‘I’m more ready to be scared of fatal young ones. Chaps just like you and me. The chaps who cruise round with these things in the sky. What about one of them going off his head?’
    ‘But they’re not quite like you and me.’ Toby said this with ironical conviction. ‘They’re not highly educatable types like us – and therefore, of course, they’re far less neurotic and unstable. Which is fortunate, is it not?’
    Once more Jean sat up straight. ‘What awful rot!