There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: four of us were joint editors, producers, and proprietors of that school paper. Who the two others were I have no idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote the greater part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he, and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of its four editors. Domestically he knew something about printing and pulls and proofs, which had escaped the experience of his friend and the family printing press, and that yearThe Marlburian, as I hope it is now, was a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished tradesman, paid the printing bills, audited the accounts, and flowed back to his collaborators a Pactolus of large silver pieces. We wrote indignant letters signed “A Parent,” and answered them with withering rejoinders signed “Another Parent”; we invented abuses, and firmly denied them; we cut down the habitual drowsy accounts of house matches to the smallest paragraphs and spread a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that football was the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a fragment of “The Princess” was dug up and edited and amended by Dry-as-Dust; or recommended the school generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the football captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it along the road, in order to enliven the stupid act of purposeless running. In this latter point we set the example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops down the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the staff of masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, going out for a run with our hoops, passed the open door of a class-room at an hour when the lower school was at work, on which a demented master sent out two juniorboys with orders to capture the hoops and bring them in to him. Now, there was nothing immoral about hoops, nor was there any school rule that forbade their employment, and so we went very briskly along down the Bath road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, and when they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. They panted up, and said they had been told to take away the hoops and bring them back to Mr. Sharpe, and so, very politely, we said, “Come and take them.” Naturally they could make no serious attempt to take away the hoops of the head of the school and the captain of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little conversation, we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the hoops of two big boys who happened to choose to bowl hoops? We soon got tired of the habit, but it was great fun to write indignant letters toThe Marlburianabout hoops signed “Magister,” and scathing replies signed “Discipulus.” It made excellent selling stuff for the paper, and boys who had never dreamed of buying aMarlburianbefore put their threepence down with a spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that there was a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of “sarc” in it. There were real letters as well from dignified Old Marlburians, beginning “Has it come to this?” ...
To all these entrancing topics the editors gave their serious consideration. They herded together for consultation, and rejected each other’s contributions with suave impartiality, and when they had settled what they wished to print, Eustace measured it, and usually said that there was too much. If it was all very precious a double number (price sixpence) was decreed; if not, a Socratic dialogue or some trifle of that kind was cut out.Three out of the four would be very complimentary to the baffled author, and assure him that they found his contribution most amusing, and if that did not soothe the rejection of it, they would grow more candid, and say it was beastly rot. When that was disposed of there might perhaps be a few inches of column to spare, and we inserted an advertisement that a sixth form boy was willing to exchange his hoop (nearly new) for a set of false teeth. Luckily someone remembered that a mathematical master had false teeth, and would be liable to think that this was “sarc” directed at him, and some answers to non-existent correspondents were put in instead. By that time the cake would be finished and the teapot dry, and Eustace took the MSS. to the printers, and I went to conduct a rehearsal of Haydn’s Symphony for the approaching Penny Reading, and ask Harry Irving what he was going to recite at it.
These Penny Readings which took place once a term were an entirely delightful institution.Qui docebant jam docentur, as theCarmentold us, for the whole of this musical and dramatic entertainment was got up, rehearsed (to whatever stage of efficiency), conducted and performed by boys without any help from masters. There were piano solos, part-songs, vocal solos or duets, and perhaps some reading or representation, say, of the trial scene inPickwick. But this year the Penny Readings included grim and finished recitations by Harry Irving, who “drew” in a manner so unprecedented, that instead of holding them in the “Bradleian,” a hall of but moderate dimensions, Upper School itself, capable of holding the entire body of boys and masters, had to be requisitioned. It fell to my lot to conduct the musical part of the entertainment, and this year we audaciously rehearsed andperformed Haydn’s Toy Symphony, in which, for a special treat, we allowed Mr. Bambridge to play the cuckoo. There he sat, rapturously cheered as he mounted to the platform with his little wooden tube, lean and grave with a steady eye fixed on the conductor’s baton. It had been arranged that the cuckoo, otherwise so obedient and punctual in its flutings, should at one point run amuck altogether, and go on saying “cuckoo” in spite of the efforts of the conductor to silence it. On it went till the roars of the audience entirely drowned its voice, and when silence was restored, it gave one more “cuckoo,”pianissimo prestissimo, just to show that it was quite unrepentant.... But more than anything did Harry Irving’s recitations bring down the house. In appearance he was his father, young and amazingly good-looking, and he had all the assurance and grip of a mature actor: he stalked and he paused, he yelled and he whispered, and he withered us with horror in some appalling little soliloquy by a dying hangman, round whose death-bed the ghosts of his victims most unpleasantly hovered. Then in the manner of a parson he gave us a short sermon on the moral lesson “to be drawn from, dear brethren, that exquisite gem of English poetry, ‘Mary had a little larm.’”
The athletic ambitions of the first of these three terms was of course to win the football cup in house-ties, and also all the school matches. Neither quite came off, for the house was beaten in the final, while the school only made a moderate show in its foreign matches. But there was little time for moaning. Close on the heels of that disappointment came the Lent term with its fives, rackets and singing cups, and there was then no cause for anything but jubilation. At Easter came the dreadful fiascoof the Public School rackets in London, and following on that, the house was again knocked out in the final at cricket. Never shall I forget the heaviness of heart with which I came down that day from the cricket-field, due, not to the fact only of defeat—for even if we had won, that sense of finality would have been there—but because for me all the zeal and the struggle, with its failures and successes, of these entrancing school games, was over. Not again could games, so I dimly and correctly realized, have quite that absorbing and pellucid quality which distinguished house matches: there was already forming in my mind, now that the last of these competitions was over, a certain dingy philosophy clouding the brightness, which recognized that games were amusements, to be taken as such. They might give exhilaration and enjoyment, but not again would they produce that unique absorption. I could not imagine again caring quite as much as I had cared during these last six years. Some hour had struck, and not alone for games, but for the multitudinous aims that had been bounded by the chapel wall on one side, the master’s garden on another, the field where was the racket court and the football grounds in winter and the cricket pitches in summer, on the third and fourth sides. There was theangulus terræ, which, apart from brief holidays, had constituted the whole of life for the vision of a boy. Apart from Addington, there was nothing in the whole round world that mattered like those few acres, and the glory which exuded out of their very soil.
Dimly I conjectured that in a few months Marlborough would be withdrawn into some bright starry orbit of its own, as far as I was concerned, revolving there with a sundered light in which I should no longershare, and that soon I should peer for it through the fog of the years that drifted across it. Some other orbit was to be mine, which, when I began to move in it, would no doubt have a heaven of its own to scour through, but as yet it had no significance for me; it was dim and uncharted. Still incurably boyish, in spite of the nineteen years which were verging on the twentieth, I felt that I was being cast out of the only place that mattered. I suppose I knew in some dull logical way, that it was otherwise: that inexorable Time which sent me forth out of this mature infancy had something left in store, but to the eyes of nineteen, everyone who is thirty, at any rate, must clearly be a sere and yellow leaf, waiting for an autumnal blast to make an end of him in the fall of withered foliage. Life might be possible up to twenty-five or so, but then beyond doubt senility must be moribund and slobbering. “Thirty at least” was the verdict then: “Thirty at most” was so soon substituted for it. For the first time in my life I had the definite sense of a book read through and loved from cover to cover, being closed, the sense of an “end,” a finished period. Hitherto, change of home or the leaving of a private school had been not an “end” but a beginning: though one experience was finished the opening of a new one, of fresh places, fresh conditions had made the old just slip from the fingers of a careless hand, without sense of loss. But now my fingers clung desperately to what was slipping away: they did not clutch at that which was coming, but tightened, as the smooth days hurtled by, on that which they still just held.
The last game that mattered “frightfully” had been already played, the last number ofThe Marlburiancame out, and while one half of me would have chosen thatthe full moon of July should know no wane, the other would willingly have seen her turn to ashes, and fall like a cinder from the sky, to match the days from which the glow and the radiance were dying in the frost of the coming departure. Inanimate objects, beloved and familiar, like the row of lime trees in the court with the circular seats round them, my house-study with the copies of Turner water-colours by my sister, the Alley and its noisy merry staircase, began to wear a strange aspect, for, so soon, they would have passed completely into other occupation. Drop by drop, like the sweet drippings from the limes, the honey was oozing from them, leaving empty cells and alien habitations.
In especial there was a certain covered columned passage, a paved and roofed pergola close to the sixth form class-room where so often I had waited for the advent of a friend. In stormy south-westerly weather the rain beat into it, but it was a good meeting-place, for the Alley, the Upper School, the sixth form room and the Bradleian made it a junction for passengers, and there was a board up with school-notices, promotions into the eleven and the fifteen and whatnot, to while away the waiting. A congregation of steps would come there as some form was released, but he was not there: then would come a few scattered steps, but not his. And then he would come round a corner, in a blustering hurry, and say, “Oh, sorry,” and together we went up to the house-study madly alive, and sanely content. Those minutes of anticipation made the columned pergola more vivid than even the house-study or the Alley or the lime trees, and in so short a while it would all be dead, as a piece of scenery remaining on a stage, where others should play their friendly and wholesome parts. If I had had thatwhich in the cant phrase is called “the corporate sense,” I suppose the great thing would have been that generations of others should do as I had done, and I should have said my grace, and got up thankfully from the delicate and vigorous feast. Instead I was Oliver and asked for more, and every year since I have wanted more of some quality that is inseparable from the wonder and sunset of boyhood. But now the sun was notched by the hills over which I must soon climb, where lay the untravelled country: its last rays were level over the plain, and before this last week of July was over, only high up on the peaks of memory away to the east would the rose linger. That, too, so I dismally supposed, would fade presently, but there I was wrong. It has never faded nor lost one atom of its radiance.
There were rejoicings and jubilations to be gone through: the advent of Nellie for prize-giving, in which at last it was my lot to make several excursions to the table where morocco-bound books were stacked. There was a house-supper on the last day of all in celebration of the winning of those challenge cups, which was gratifying also, but below that was the sound of the passing-bell. All that day it sounded, except just at the moment when I should have expected it to be most unbearably funereal. For the friend for whom I had so often waited in the colonnade came up with me to the cricket pavilion, from which I had to take away blazers and bat and cricketing paraphernalia, and having got them stuffed inside my bag, we sat on the steep bank overlooking the field to wait for the first stroke of the chapel-bell. Other groups were straying about the grass, and some came and talked for a bit, and we wished they would go away, because nobody else was wanted just then. It was notthat there was anything particular to say, for boys don’t say much to one another, and we lay on the grass, and chewed the sweet ends of it, and when not silent, talked of perfectly trivial things. And at last the friend rolled over on to his face and said:
“Oh, damn!”
“Why?” I asked, knowing quite well.
“Because it will be awful rot without you.”
“You’ll soon find somebody else,” said I.
“Funny,” said he.
“Laugh then,” said I.
He sat up, nursing his knees in his arms, and looking down over the field. Just below was the stretch of grass where house football-ties were played in the winter, to the left was Beesly’s house, and at the bottom of the field the racket court. Beyond and below across the road the chapel and the red school-buildings. Then his eyes came back from their excursion.
“It’s been ripping anyhow,” he said. “Did two fellows ever have such a good time?”
Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should have been loudest, it ceased altogether. The whole of my dismal maunderings about days that were dead and years that were past, I knew to be utterly mistaken. Nothing that was worth having was dead or past at all: it was all here now, and all mine, a possession eternally alive.
“But did they?” he repeated, as I did not answer.
“Never. Nor will. And there’s chapel-bell. Get up.”
He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his clothes.
“Psalms this morning,” he said telegraphically.
“I know. ‘Brethren and companions’ sake.’ Didn’t think you had noticed.”
“Rather. Good old Psalm.”
I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry it. A handle came off.
“Ass,” said I.
“Well, it was three-quarters off already,” said he. “Come on; we shall be late. You can leave it at the porter’s lodge.”
“Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully,” said I.
“Sarc,” said he.
There was Beesly on the platform next day when I got to the station, and I remembered he had asked me what train I was going by. He just nodded to me, and continued looking at volumes on the bookstall. But just as the whistle sounded, he came to the carriage door.
“Just came to see you off,” he said. “Don’t forget us all.”
THE whole family went that summer holiday to the Lakes, where my father had taken the Rectory of Easedale, and in that not very commodious house five children, two parents and Beth all managed to shelter themselves from the everlasting rain that deluged those revolting regions. Had not steep muddy hills separated one lake from another, I verily believe that the Lakes must have become one sheet of mournful water with a few Pikes and Ghylls sticking up like Mount Ararat on another occasion that can scarcely have been more rainy. There was fishing to be had, but no fish: you might as well have fished in the rapids of Niagara as cast a fly on the streams, while the lakes themselves are noted for their depths of barren water. Out we used to go in mackintoshes, and back we came in mackintoshes, and I cannot suppose that thirty years later the Rectory at Easedale can have lost its smell of wet india-rubber and drying homespuns. As a special contribution to the general discomfort Nellie discovered and developed a grand sort of ailment called “pleurodynia,” which I suppose is the result of never being dry, and I capped that by cultivating the most orange-coloured jaundice ever seen, and continued being violently sick when you would have thought there was nothing to be sick with.
But these atrocious tempests gave my father unlimitedscope for what his irreverent family called “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.” Best of all situations in the holidays he loved to have his entire family sitting close round him busy, silent and slightly unreal to their own sense, while he “did” his Cyprian. There he sat with his books and papers in front of him, at the end of a table in a smallish room, with all of us sitting there, each with his book, speaking very rarely and very quietly, so as not to disturb him, and everybody, alas, except him, slightly constrained. In these holidays, Hugh, owing to inveterate idleness at Eton (where, beating me, he had got a scholarship), had a tutor to whom he paid only the very slightest attention, and on these evenings he would have some piece of Horace to prepare for next day, and would work at it for a little, and then drop his dictionary with a loud slap on the floor. Soon he would begin to fidget, and then catch sight of Arthur reading, and something in his expression would amuse him. He drew nearer him a piece of sermon paper which Nellie’s pen was busy devouring on behalf of the nextSaturday Magazine, and began making a caricature. At the same moment perhaps I would observe below lowered eyelids that Arthur was drawing me, and so I began to draw my mother, and Nellie catching the infection, began to draw Maggie. (If you gave her pulled-back hair and a tall forehead, the family would easily recognize it.) And then perhaps my father, pausing in his work, would see Hugh with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth (for that is the posture in which you can draw best) and say:
“Dear boy, have you finished your preparation for to-morrow? What are you doing?”
Hugh would allow he hadn’t quite finished his preparation, not having begun it, and my father would lookat his drawing, and his mouth, the most beautiful that ever man had, would uncurl, until perhaps he threw back his head and laughed with that intense merriment that was so infectious. Possibly he might not be amused, and a little grave rebuke followed; he returned to his Cyprian and we all sat quiet again. But the criticism of the family was that this was “Papa’s game, and he made the rules.” For he, unable to get on with his Cyprian, or arriving at the end of a bit of work, would interrupt at will the mumness which was imposed on his behalf. But if Maggie or I finished what we were doing, we might not make general conversation.... And then the door would open, and Beth looked in, and said, “Eh, it’s dressing-time,” and her lovely old face would grow alight with love when she looked on my mother, her child of the elder family, and five more of her children of the second generation. From my father there would always be a delicious word of welcome for her, and he would say:
“Beth, you’re interrupting us all. Go away. Your watch is wrong.”
“Nay, sir, it isn’t,” said Beth—she always said “sir” to him, whatever his title was—“It’s gone half-past seven.” And she beamed and nodded, perfectly at ease in this solemn assembly. With her (who counted of course as one of it) there were eight in that little stuffy room, where we fidgeted and sat and read. And what would not I give, who with one other alone survive from those evenings, to have an hour of them again, in that inconvenient proximity, surrounded by the huge love of a family so devoted and critical of each other, with the two amongst them whom nobody criticized, my mother with her spectacles on her forehead, and Beth looking in at the door?
Then jaundice descended on me like the blur of a London fog, and through the depression of it, there seemed no ray that could penetrate. But my mother managed to effect that entry, as of course she always would, and she came back one dripping afternoon from Grasmere, with a packet in her hand.
“As it’s all so hopeless,” she said, “I bought some lead soldiers. Oh, do let us have a battle.”
She poured a torrent of these metal warriors on to a table by my bed. There were cannons with springs that shot out peas, and battalions of infantry, and troops of cavalry. It was she, you must understand, who wanted to play soldiers, and to a jaundiced cynic of twenty that necessarily was quite irresistible. Who could have resisted a mother whoaskedyou at her age to play soldiers? We shot down regiments at a time, for when you enfilade a line of lead soldiers with a pea, if you hit the end man, he topples against the next one, and the next against the next, till there are none left standing. The peas flew about the room, rattled against washing-basins and tapped at the window-panes, and I felt much better. Then we bombarded Beth who came to know if I wouldn’t like some dinner, and as I wouldn’t, it was time to go to sleep.
“A nice little bit of beef,” began Beth.
“If you say beef again, I shall be sick,” said the invalid.
“Nay, you won’t,” said Beth hopefully.
Then to my mother:
“Eh, dear, do go and dress,” she said, “or you’ll keep everybody waiting.”
My mother shot a final pea.
“I won’t be the conventional mother,” she said, “and smooth your pillow for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoeafter dinner to see if you’re asleep. But, my darling, Iknowyou’ll be better to-morrow! Won’t you?”
King’s College, Cambridge, whither my father accompanied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years previously, become an open College; for centuries before that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it followed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he obtained in due rotation, without any further examination, a King’s scholarship, when he went up to the University. After that, often while he was still an undergraduate, he became a fellow of King’s, and for the rest of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year provided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent endowment for the encouragement of learning and the education of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachronisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket-boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parliament.
The founder’s idea had been that from year to year the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fineness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely suffered from them. A Fellow of King’s, thus supported for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compulsion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or £400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who might or might not, according to their own inclination, work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his rooms till dusk began to fall: then he would totter, stick in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to himself, “Ah, damn you, you haven’t got me yet!” After this edifying excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no more till dusk next day. All his life since the age of twelve or so, the bounty of Henry VI had supported him, and until the worms finally did “get” him, nothing could deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the intention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be conjectured from the list of the fellows, which from firstto last contains no name of the slightest eminence or distinction as a scholar, except that of the late Walter Headlam, who was not an Etonian.
The reconstruction of King’s took place some years before I went up, and no more of these life-fellows were appointed. Henceforth fellowships expired at the end (I think) of six years, though they could be prolonged if the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was engaged in such research as made it proper that his term should be extended. But such men as were already life-fellows were not shorn of their fellowships, and whether or no they were resident, whether or not they were engaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held to be congruous to the intention of the founder, they were still entitled for life to their income, their commons, and dinner, and if they chose to reside in the college to a set of fellows’ rooms. At that time the college buildings would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and freshmen, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings outside college; but in spite of this certain life-fellows still clung to their privileges, and continued to retain sets of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings, which they never occupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic work in London, used to come up for a week or two at the end of the Christmas term, but for the rest of the year his rooms stood vacant, while two others, who to the best of my knowledge never appeared in Cambridge at all, had another set of rooms, which were used merely as guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of survivals such as the founder never contemplated was ancient and dusky in appearance, and never left King’s at all, though he took no part in the academic life of the place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupying himself otherwise with making faint wailings on a violin.... But a friend of mine and I chanced on the discovery that if you whistled as he crossed the court to chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause, proceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle would make him retrace his steps, and it was possible by continuing to whistle, to drive him back to his rooms. This was extremely interesting, but the cause baffled conjecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite seclusion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long believed to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with a leg of cold mutton on the sideboard and a table laid as for dinner, and was induced to play the violin at college concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder) he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared from these haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine that the founder contemplated that the head of the college should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes, though resident, was approaching or had already reached his ninetieth year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the Provost’s Lodge. I am sure I never set eyes on him at all; he took no part whatever in college business, as indeed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but there he had lingered on from year to year without a single thought of resignation entering his venerable head. Though totally past work, he was Provost of King’s and Provost of King’s he remained, a drone apparently imperishable.
Others, however, of these life-fellows justified themselves by a busy existence; there was the Vice-Provost, Augustus Austen Leigh, who performed all the presidential duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J. E. Nixon, Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to undergraduates, and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, who surely made up for these drones who abused the bounty of the founder, by his prodigious activities. In appearance he was the oddest of mortals, a little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows’ Garden, a black tail-coat, and boots of immense length, of which the toes pointed sharply upwards. He had only one hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial, covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only one eye, and that the right, but the other was marvellously sharp. He made a tennis-ball to nestle in the crook of his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his body flung it into the air and severely served it.
His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If it was obviously out of range he would say (running all his words into each other like impressions on blotting paper): “SurelythatsratherhighisthatonlyA?”... Then the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we startedagain. Where he found all these rounds and catches I cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have heard in Nixon’s room has never reached my ears again, nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended these meetings, who was acquainted with the following catch. It startedLento, and, under the strokes of the paper-knife quickened up toandanteandallegro, and endedprestissimo possibile. The words ran thus, starting with a first tenor lead:
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate,The debate.Pray support the chair!Pray support the chair!Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate.Question! question! Order! order!Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear!(Da capo: da capo: da capo.)
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate,The debate.Pray support the chair!Pray support the chair!Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate.Question! question! Order! order!Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear!(Da capo: da capo: da capo.)
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate,The debate.Pray support the chair!Pray support the chair!Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,I must lengthen the debate.Question! question! Order! order!Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear!(Da capo: da capo: da capo.)
Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over “Order! Order!” grew louder and louder, until the whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and tried to find “I loved thee beautiful and kind.”
Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called “starting a hare.” He would advance some amazing
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proposition, such as “Why shouldn’t we all—no, that wouldn’t do, but why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees in the morning, and work in the evening?” He argued about the most casual topic: if you said, “It’s a fine day,” he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something he was carrying, and said, “It all depends on what you mean by fine. If you mean sun and blue sky, granted; but why shouldn’t you call it fine if there are buckets of rain? It all depends what you mean by ‘fine.’ A fish now——”
“I meant an ordinary fine day,” began his bewildered guest.
“Very well: but I say ‘fish.’ I’m a fish and you’re a fish. To a fish probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, and there you are.”
There you were: long before anybody else Nixon had invented the art of preposterous conversation, which Mr. Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar Wilde. To Nixon it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a science, a product of definite reasoning. He would not change the subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes (often by himself), but would confidently blow on the cinders, expecting some unconjecturable Phœnix to arise from them.
By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar Browning, without mention of whom no adequate idea of Cambridge life in the late eighties and early nineties can possibly be arrived at. Though King’s was in large measure a college quite apart from the rest of the University, giving itself (so said the rest of the University) unwarrantable airs, Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler to designate as O.B. for he was never known otherwise) pervaded not King’s only, but the whole of Cambridge,with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and rotund youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really challenged by the most devout of his competitors, for who except O.B. at the age of forty-five or so, ever bought a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic frame in order to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the Duke of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir-presumptive to the English throne? I was still a junior at Marlborough when these Homeric events happened, but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking about the “awfully jolly” games of hockey he had with Prince Eddy.... Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, which he certainly did, affords a key to the intensity of his activities.
He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and English history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside his enmired tricycle to whom he said:
“Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha!”
“Charlie old boy,” with his face a-shine with smiles, gave the required push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I swooped and swerved along the road in order to go very slowly.
“Charlie is my gyp’s son,” he said. “Such a jolly boy. Thanks awfully, Charlie. Well, there I was, when the Grand Duke’s yacht came into Taormina. And, by the way, do you know the Maloja? The Crown-Princess of Germany came there one year when I was in the hotel, so I dressed myself like a Roman proconsul, in a white togaof bath towels, ha, ha, and—and—really these ruts are most annoying—and a laurel wreath, and went out to meet her Royal Highness. I had a retinue of four young men who were staying at the hotel as lictors, with axes and sticks, and I read a short address to her to welcome her, and we had lunch together, and played lawn-tennis and it was all awfully jolly and friendly and unconventional. Why aren’t we all natural, instead of being afraid of poor Mrs. Grundy, whose husband surely died so long ago? She has never married again, which shows she must be a most unpopular female. Most females, I notice, are so unpopular: they never know when they’re wanted, and their hearts are always bigger than their heads. Not of course your dear mother—those charming Lambeth garden parties—and dear Lady Salisbury. I saw the Queen when I was at Balmoral last year—my bootlace has come undone, so careless of Charlie not to notice it—and how hopelessly benighted is Cambridge altogether! Lord Acton came to stay with me the other day—I think my tricycle wants oiling—and dined with me at the High Table. Nixon was sitting on his other side, propounding conundrums about bed-makers, and hoping that he would sing glees with him. Ha! Ha! Every boy ought to realize his youth, instead of wasting his energies over elegiacs. When the Grand Duke came into Taormina——”
It is really impossible to render the variety of O.B.’s general conversation, of which the foregoing is but a dim reproduction. His performances, too (the expression of himself in deeds), were just as various, and yet everyone in Cambridge was aware that behind this garish behaviour there was a real, a forcible and a big personality. His performances chiefly expressed themselves in tricyclingsand bathings, in lectures on English history, which nobody attended, and in At-Homes on Sunday evening, which everybody attended. He had a set of four rooms (the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open to anybody, and if you had said you wanted a bath in the middle of the party, O.B. would certainly have said, “Ha, ha! awfully jolly,” have given you a sponge and a towel and have come in to help. Next to that came his bedroom, lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, with a bronze reproduction of the Greek “Winged Sleep” over his bed; then, not a whit more public than these apartments came two big sitting-rooms, in one of which was a grand piano, and four small harmoniums of various tones, one flute-like, one more brazen in quality, and two faintly resembling wheezy and unripe violins. On these—each with its performer and a miniature score—O.B. and Bobby, and Dicky and Tommy would execute some deliberate quartette, or with the piano to keep them all moderately together would plunge with gay, foolhardy courage into the Schumann quintette. Never was there a more incredible sight (you could hardly believe you saw it) than that of O.B. pedalling away at this Obeophone (for thus this curious harmonium was aptly named) with his great body swaying to and fro and strange crooning sounds coming out of his classical mouth to reinforce the flutings of his melody, while Bobby and Dicky and Tommy, nimble-fingered members of the Cambridge Musical Society, sat with brows corrugated by their anxiety to keep in time with O.B. They never learned that they were attempting an impossibility, but followed him faint yet pursuing as he galloped along a few bars ahead, or suddenly slowed down so that they shot in front of him. At the conclusion he would patthem all on the back, and say, “Awfully jolly Brahms is, or was it Beethoven?” and proceed to sing, “Funiculi, funicula” himself.... Groups formed and reformed; here would be a couple of members of the secret and thoughtful society known as “The Apostles” with white careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing the ethical limits of Determinism; there the President of the Union playing noughts and crosses with a Cricket Blue; there an assembly of daring young men who tore their gowns, and took the board out of their caps, in order to present a more libertine and Bohemian appearance, when they conversed with the young lady in the tobacconist’s. Dons from King’s or other colleges fluttered in and out like moths, and the room grew ever thicker with the smoke of innumerable cigarettes. But O.B., however mixed and incongruous was the gathering, never lost his own hospitable identity in the crowd; waving bottles of curious hock he would spur on the pianist to fresh deeds of violence, making some contribution to the discussion on Determinism, and promise to speak at the next debate at the Union, as he wandered from room to room, bald and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good-humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordinary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.
A small college as King’s then was, splits up into far more sharply defined cliques than a large one, and it was not long before I found myself firmly attached to a small group consisting in the main of Etonians belonging either to King’s or Trinity. The younger fellows of the college mixed very democratically with undergraduates of all years, and the head of this vivid group was certainly Monty James, subsequently Provost of King’s and now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, and Lionel Ford, now headmaster of Harrow, both of them having lately taken their degrees, were of the company, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working for a degree in music, and a little later among junior members R. Carr Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We were all members of the Pitt Club, that delightful and unique institution where, to the end of your life, once being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members of a literary society called “The Chitchat,” in which on Saturday night each in rotation entertained the society at his rooms with an original paper on any subject as intellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup, anchovy toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, for physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went round too early, awful reverberations of sneezing from the unaccustomed punctuated the intellectual fare, andI remember (still with pain) reading a paper on Marlowe’sFaustus, during which embarrassing explosions unnerved me. I had reason to quote (at a very impressive stage of this essay) certain lines from that tragedy, which with stage directions came out as follows:
On another occasion a prominent philologist whose turn it was to regale us, found that he had not had leisure to write his paper on “Manners” and proposed to address us on the subject instead. He strode about the room gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearthrug, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away instead of his match, while he harangued us on this interesting ethical topic, with interspersed phrases of French and German, and odd English words like “cocksuredom.” As this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled down on “The Chitchat”; its decorous members bit their lips, and prudently refrained from looking each other in the face, and there were little stifled noises like hiccups or birds in bushes going about the room, and the sofa where three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then he diverged,via, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the ancient Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a practical illustration to throw himself into the attitude of Discobolus. At that precise moment, Dr. Cunningham of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a great deal, completely lost control of himself.Claret-cup spurted from his nose and mouth; I should not have thought a man could have so violently choked and laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to himself. That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round the entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. Cunningham, finding he could not stop laughing at all, seized his cap and gown and left the room with a rapid and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the open windows as he crossed the court....
But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, when in rotation, they dined in each other’s rooms. This institution (known as the “T.A.F.” or “Twice a Fortnight”) had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen, that brilliant and erratic genius, then in London, editingThe Mirrorand astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two later returned to Cambridge again, and, until his final and melancholy eclipse, diffused over everyone who came across him the beam of his intellect and personality. Of him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends met, so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty James. Intellectually (or perhaps æsthetically) I, like many others, made an unconditional surrender to his tastes, and, with a strong prepossession already in that direction, I became convinced for the time—and the time was long—that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the keys of the heavenly kingdom of literature. When dinner at the T.A.F. was over, Monty James might be induced to read about the birthday-party of the Kenwigses, with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter on the reader’s part over Mr. Lillyvick’s glass of grog, cast it forth on to the hearth-rug. He almost made medethrone Bach from his legitimate seat, and by a revolutionary movement place Handel there instead, so magnificent were the effects produced, when with him playing the bass, and me the treble from a pianoforte arrangement for two hands, we thundered forth the “Occasional Overture.” He was a superb mimic, and at the T.A.F. and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in which the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridiculous yet. And when on these Sunday evenings the Dickens reading, and the “Occasional Overture,” and some singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F. would go to O.B.’s “at home,” and mingle with inferior mortals.
Another society common to many members of the T.A.F. was the Decemviri Debating Society. To this, some time during my undergraduate days, I was elected, though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to belong to it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, then as now, invariably deprived me of coherent utterance, and a rich silence was all that I felt capable of contributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never attended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was that if any member absented himself for a term (or was it two?) from the debates, he should be deprived of the privileges of membership, I received one day a notice of the next debate, at which there was private business to be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion. Unjustifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to flight, and I was allowed to open another debate in the place of that already arranged for, and to make a speech to show reason why I should not be expelled. My motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a meeting of the Decemviri again.
I suppose it must have been that belated year of voluntary reading at Marlborough, which enabled me to win an exhibition at King’s at the end of my first term; after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid of all interest in classical subjects. There was not the smallest spur to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or lecturers: if you attended lectures and were duly marked off as present, you had conformed to the rite, but nothing you heard could conceivably stimulate your zeal. The classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we followed Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War stood on a daïs at the end of the lecture room, and indecently denuded his subject of any appeal to interest. He put his head on one side and said, “Then came Sphacteria: I don’t know what Sphodrias was about,” and so nobody knew what either Sphodrias or Mr. X—— was about. He looked over exercises in Greek prose as well: on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and received, for the only time, his warm approval. A piece of Greek prose, according to academic standards, appeared to be good, in proportion as it “brought in” quotations and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo English was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags and unusual words and crabbed constructions from the most obscure passages were supposed to constitute good Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee represented an example of dignified English. To quote from that immortal and neglected work, “Having said these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open them again. He becamesotto vocefor a few hours, and he went to God about 6 p.m.” As this sublime death-bed scene appears to the ordinaryEnglishman, so would the prose which Mr. X—— approved have appeared to the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles.... But he had been Senior Classic, and carried on the wonderful tradition, and in other respects was classical tutor and an eager but inefficient whist-player. Nixon, an equally traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. Any dawning of love for classical language receded, as far as I was concerned, into murk midnight again, and having temporarily justified my existence by winning an exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year and a half to follow more attractive studies. A year’s hard work on the approved Baboo lines, I calculated, would be sufficient to secure success in the Classical Tripos, which was the next event of any importance.
Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new University magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as myself was joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two or three years our senior, and some B.A. whose name I cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly drew the illustration on the cover of theCambridge Fortnightly, which represented a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College Chapel. O.B. contributed a poem to it, so also did my brother Arthur, and Mr. Barry Pain sent us one of the best parodies in the language, called “The Poets at Tea,” in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously characteristic of themselves. He also tried to galvanize theCambridge Fortnightlyinto life by one or more admirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson applied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant was clearly stillborn, and considering the extreme feebleness of most of its organs, I do not wonder that it was, after the lapse of a term or so, quite despaired of. It had really never lived: it had merely appeared. My share in the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was already too busy writingSketches from Marlborough, which was duly and magnificently published within a year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be told that I had better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform my father of this literary adventure; then, when a local printer and publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, undertook its production, I thought he would consider it very odd that I had not told him of it before and so I did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached him, and he wrote me the most loving letter of remonstrance at my having kept it from him. There was no word of blame for this amateur expenditure of time and energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still felt that if he had known I was working at it, he certainly would have suggested that I might have been better occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I knew to what entrancing occupation I had really determined to devote my life, and though I might have made a better choice, I could not, my choice being really made, have been better occupied than in practising for it. The book in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part about it (of which the omens have been amply fulfilled) being the extreme facility with which it was produced.
Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of reverent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of King’s decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the organ, a “huge house of sounds” with walls of gilded pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on Sunday afternoons in the short days of winter would be nearly dark, but for the soft glow of the innumerable wax candles with which the choir was lit, flowing over the organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those Sunday afternoon services, there would still be a little light outside, though that would have faded altogether before service was over, and just opposite where I sat was the window that I love best in all the world. The Saviour has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress of sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She had been weeping and had heard behind her the question, “Woman, why weepest thou?” Her bereaved heart had answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener had said, “Mary.” It was then, in that window, that she knew him, and turning, she bowed herself to the ground, with one hand stretched out to him, and said, “Rabboni!” In the garden of the Resurrection He stood, with the flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spikenard, very precious, with which she had anointed them for his burial.... During the Psalms for the twenty-seventh evening of the month, when she who sowed in tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark againstthe faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candle-light spread like a luminous fog to the cells of the vaulting above. At the end of the service, the red curtain across the arch in the screen was drawn back, and you peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the night....
Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill of fare on the chapel door would bring you, a little before anthem time, into the nave, for Wesley’s “Wilderness” was soon to be sung. The choir, when service was going on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but the candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made visible the roof, and the black silhouettes of the trumpeting angels on the organ. Then the solo bass began: there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and the treble solo and chorus of the flight of sorrow and sighing. Perhaps you waited for the conclusion of inaudible prayers, on the chance that Dr. Mann would play a Bach-fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain had been drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries. There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the gamba on the swell started the melodious discussion, and its soliloquy provoked an answer in the same words but with another voice. The duet “thickened and broadened,” fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, and gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one keyboard, silent as yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. What thegambahad stated, the diapason now proclaimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, for what but theTubascould so have imposed themselves and penetrated that immense and melodious rioting of sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four cornersof the organ, “opened their mouths and drew in their breath,” and spoke through their celestial trumpets.
It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology the infinity of interests that interweaved themselves with these three undergraduate years, and the reader must sympathetically partake of amacedoineof memories, that were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had the emotional experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson double the part of Hermione and Perdita inThe Winter’s Tale, and fell violently in love with her. Never surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, never did another actress make such music of the tale of the flowers she had gathered. No sculptor’s skill or whiteness of Pentelic marble ever approached the glory of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of joy I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving of lovely arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was no statue any more but the queen, living and moving again. I bought a photograph of her, carried it about with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover it, for he would not have cared much about this experience of mine. Not for nearly thirty years later did I meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated homage before her.
Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, as must needs be, of lesser magnitude, now that new constellations directed my voyagings, but, being granted anexeatof two nights in order to witness the opening of Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get half a day at my school. Already the old order hadchanged; the values were different, and even as I had once suspected, a few months had sufficed to do that. Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed and assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which was imperishably part of my personality: my very identity would have been something other than it was, had I not lived and grown up there. But many ties which had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I saw which were the closest of all, and they, just one or two of them, were as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still merry-eyed behind the pince-nez to which he had taken, and that of the friend who on the last day of term had sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He absented himself from an hour of morning-school, and met me, dishevelled with a night journey, at the station. As we passed through the town we bought rolls and sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, making breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, and for that hour it was as if the rind of the last months had been peeled off, and the old friendship glowed like the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little impression I had made on that shining shore was already washed by the advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a little higher up the beach, the sand-castles of others were growing tall and turreted under vigorous spades....
EVEN away from Cambridge, which in those undergraduate years was necessarily the hot hub of the universe, life remained as highly coloured as at the time when Lambeth and Addington first flung open their adorable pasturages. It was thrilling to know that Robert Browning was coming to dinner one night, to be grasped by the hearty hand that had written the poems of which a fives competition had procured me a copy. There was but a small party on the night that I remember, and after dinner my father moved up to take the place next him, and beckoned to me to close up on the other side. Somehow a mention came of a volume of Austin Dobson’s, and Robert Browning preserved a cheerful silence till some direct question was put to him. Then, drinking off his port, he made a notable phrase.
“Well, some people like carved cherry-stones,” he said.
I fancy he always avoided talking of his own works, and that my father knew this, for certainly no allusion was made to them. But, as we rose, he volunteered a question to my father, saying, “What of my work do you like best?” On which my father replied:
“Your lyrics.”
Robert Browning gave some great gesticulation; he seems to me now to have rubbed his hands, or jumped or stamped a foot.
“Lyrics?” he said. “I have deskfuls of them.”
In consequence, I still faintly hope that some day there may be discovered a great ream of lyrics by Robert Browning, for, as far as I know, “deskfuls” have not yet appeared.
On another occasion Tennyson was there. Of his conversation I have no sort of recollection, the reason for which lapse may be probably accounted for by the fact that he didn’t say anything. But I had picked his note of acceptance out of my mother’s waste-paper basket and the envelope signed in the bottom left-hand corner, both torn across, so he could not leave me comfortless.
How very odd these dinner-parties, great or small, would have appeared at the present day! There was but one circulation of wine after the ladies had rustled forth, and even when they had gone, there was nothing in the shape of tobacco, which, combined with the indolent progression of the decanter, surely accounted for the austerity of Tennyson. A long sitting of abstemious gentlemen was succeeded by a short sitting in the drawing-room, and then the bell sounded at ten, and the whole company trooped into the chapel for a slightly abbreviated evensong. Sometimes, this service was before dinner; otherwise, at its conclusion, round about half-past ten, the guests departed, for after this long devotional interlude, it was frankly impossible to resume a festive sociability. Already the cigarette-habit had made its footing in most houses, to the extent, anyhow, of a guest, if so decadently inclined, having opportunity of indulging his lust, but neither at Lambeth nor at Addington was there any parleying with the enemy. My father intensely disliked the smell of tobacco, and once only when the present King, as Duke of York, dined at Lambeth, was an after-dinner cigarette allowed. On that occasion I, greatly daring, told my father that he liked a cigarette after dinner (so it was popularly supposed), and for the first time, the gallery of portraits was veiled behind the unusual incense. There were many great stern houses in the eighties, which kept the flag of no surrender flying in the dining-room, but I doubt if any except my father’s held out till after the middle of the nineties. He knew of but ignored the existence of a smoking-room at Lambeth and Addington, but neither in drawing-room or dining-room, nor until the hour of bedroom candles (electric lighting being still an exceptional illumination) was there the chance of a cigarette.
A story,ben trovato, it may be, was told in this regard, as to how, when a Pan-Anglican conference was in progress at Lambeth and the whole house was buzzing with bishops, my father had occasion late one night to visit the bedroom of one of the prelates, with some paper ofagendafor next day: He got no answer to his tap on the door, and entered, to find the occupant on his knees before the fire-place. My father, supposing that he was at his private devotions silently withdrew himself, and tiptoed down the corridor again. The devotional tenant, unaware of any entrance, but knowing the rule of the house, continued to inhale his cigar, and puff the aromatic evidence of his crime up the chimney.... Though my father knew that his chaplains smoked, he would never acknowledge it, and if a letter, difficultly drafted and brought to him for his approval, bore unmistakable evidences of this aid to inspiration, he would sniff at the original letter and its answer, and say, “He must have written it in a smoking-carriage.” And though, again, he knew quite well that all his three sons smoked likechimneys, I have heard him confidently assert that none of us ever did. He would have liked to believe that. In fact he would have liked it so much, that his fervour allowed him to believe it.
But I am sure it never entered his head that my mother smoked. She did: and once after a journey of a day and a night and half a day to the Riffel Alp, my father, absolutely unfatigued, insisted on the whole family getting on to a glacier of some sort without delay. My mother racked with headache, but thinking the air would do her good, came with us, but having gained the glacier, refused to proceed, and sat down on a rock on the moraine to wait for her family’s return. She indicated that I should stay with her, and as soon as the family’s back was turned she whispered, “Oh, give me a cigarette, Fred.” By some strange mischance I hadn’t got one, and was only possessed of a small and reeking clay pipe and some tobacco. But I filled and lit it for her, and there she sat smoking her clay pipe like a gipsy-woman, which made me laugh so much that the rest of the family turned rounden blocto see what was happening. Nothing appeared to be happening, because she was wise enough to hand the pipe back to me, and on they went. Then she had a little more, and her headache was routed....
That Riffel Alp holiday was one of the most sumptuous. Mountain-climbing with guides and porters is an expensive pursuit, but my father “treated me” straight off to any two first-class peaks I wanted to ascend. My instant first choice was the Matterhorn, and after a few days’ gymnastics on less austere summits I set forth, chaperoned by the most zealous of Alpinists, Mr. Toswill, to make this adorable ascent. We slept in the Schwarz-See Hotel, and starting at a moonless midnight to thelight of a lantern, stumbled on in that inconvenient illumination till the first hint of dawn made the east dove-coloured and the lantern could be quenched. The excitement of the climb quickened the perceptions, and that opening flower of day was the very glory of the Lord, first shining on the earth. We still climbed in the clear dusk, but high, incredibly high above us the top of the great cliff grew rose-coloured, as the sun, still below our horizon, smote it with day. The sky was clear and the stars grew dim, as the great halls of heaven were slowly flooded with light. Step by step the day descended from peak to shoulder of our mountain till it met us on the rocky stair. Dent Blanche, Rothorn, Gabelhorn, Weisshorn were dazzled with the dawn: looking down into the Zermatt valley was still like gazing into dark clear water.
But that clarity of morning was not for long. On all sides clouds were forming—it is a mistake as a rule to speak of clouds “coming up”: they just happen—and before we reached the famous shoulder, it was certain that if we were to make our peak, we must race against the thickening weather. Already the range along the Théodul was blanketed, and mist-wreaths were beginning to form on the east side of our mountain below us. If they stopped there and did not form higher up they would do us no harm, but nobody would choose to be above the shoulder of the Matterhorn in cloud. So at high speed—duly recorded in the Visitors’ Book at the hut—we made our peak, opened the bottle of Bouvier (most of which in that low pressure of the air rose like a geyser and intoxicated the snows) and began the descent. The air was notably still: not a breath of wind stirred, but somewherebelow us there were boomings of thunder not very remote.
Before we got back to the shoulder a wisp of cloud flicked round the edge of the precipice which plunges a sheer four thousand feet on to the Zmutt glacier, and in a moment we were enveloped by it. The sun was expunged, the cold suddenly grew intense, and snow denser than I thought possible that snow could be, began to fall. In five minutes we wore the thickest white mantles, so too, which was less convenient, did the rocks, which at this point are not only difficult by reason of their steepness, but dangerous because of the downward slope of the strata. The thunder moved up to meet us, in fact we were just beginning to pass into the storm-clouds themselves. The air was highly charged with electricity, for presently the points of our ice-axes fizzled and sang like kettles on the boil. Then below, a light, violet and vivid, leaped suddenly out of the murk of snow, and the thunder reverberated sharp as the crack of a dog-whip. Once our rope got fouled, and we all had to untie ourselves and stand perched on our steps, while the guide wrought to release it. Forty highly exciting minutes enabled us to crawl down through the storm, and reach clear air again, and though I am glad to have dived through a thunderstorm on the Matterhorn, I will willingly dispense with any further experience of the sort. Those forty minutes rattling with ambient thunder were much too tense to allow of conscious alarm, and I never wished I was “safe home” again. But I would never choose to do it a second time.