Mr. Jackson, a tall, short-sighted clergyman with the green moustache,
and classical tutor at St. Stephen’s College, was accustomed to dine _en
garçon_ every Saturday night in Hall, instead of _en famille_ at home,
and after two or three glasses of port, play a rubber of whist in the
room of one of his colleagues. To-night the gathering was planned to
take place at Mr. Butler’s rooms in the Fellows’ Buildings, and it was
with great pleasure that he had heard his host ask Waters and Alison to
complete the four. They were all Classical dons, tutors and lecturers,
and it was completely characteristic of them that they continued to play
whist rather than bridge, which they considered a debased and easy
variety of dummy whist. All four had minds of the same academic calibre,
and they constituted in this very Conservative college the stronghold
and inner defences of Conservatism. Chief among its tenets was the
doctrine that Latin and Greek were the sole and essential instruments of
education that should be used on the mind of the young, just as cricket
and football and rowing were a young man’s proper physical exercises. In
later life you could play golf and lawn-tennis and croquet, even as in
later life you could learn French and Italian, in which, no doubt,
there were many light and agreeable pieces of literature to be enjoyed.
But until you had attained to maturity all these minor diversions had
best be eschewed. “A fellow,” as Mr. Jackson was fond of saying, “who
can write a decent set of Greek Iambics, or translate a piece of Gibbon
into Thucydidean Greek, has a trained mind, which can without difficulty
acquire any other subject of human knowledge with which his profession
makes it desirable that he should be acquainted.”
This creed Mr. Jackson put into practice every day of the term. Greek
was the special subject that he taught, and week by week his pupils,
besides attending his lectures, which just now were concerned with the
Peloponnesian war, made renderings of English verse into Iambics and
English prose into its possible equivalent in Thucydidean or Platonic
Greek. The point of these exercises really was to cram into the
rendering as many tags from classical authors as could be dragged in.
When a set of Iambics were plentifully besprinkled with phrases and
unusual usages from Æschylus or Sophocles, Mr. Jackson considered them a
good effort of scholarship, and never paused to reflect whether it might
not be merely a specimen of the most comical Baboo Greek.
Everything connected with classical Greek was an unrivalled instrument
of education in his regard, and thus his pupils were also thoroughly
instructed in Greek history. They might be as ignorant as a sucking
child on the subject of French, Italian or English history; their
claims, as regards history, to be educated rested solely on their
knowledge of Greek history. Similarly it was nice to know dates; he had
no objection to anyone being aware of the year in which Constantinople
fell into the hands of Osman, or England into those of William the
Conqueror. But it was necessary to salvation to have on the tip of your
tongue the date of the death of Pericles. Subsequently, in Greek
history, the classical age ceased, and that nation and language had not
the good luck to interest Mr. Jackson any further at all.
His loyal conspirator and coadjutor in keeping the Greek flag flying was
Waters, who was to make one of the four to-night, and since his host
Butler held the same views with regard to Latin as he to Greek, and had
asked Alison, his Latin fellow-conspirator, to complete the table,
Jackson felt justified in expecting a pleasant evening. It was not that
he intended or expected that anybody would talk “shop” with regard to
education; simply he felt happier and more at ease in the presence of
classical scholars than in that of mathematicians or natural scientists.
With natural scientists he had, however, a bond in common (when they did
not bring into prominence their doleful heresy that natural science or
natural history could possibly be considered an instrument of
education), for he himself had for years been an enthusiastic collector
of fresh-water shells. But that was his hobby, over which he unbent his
mind, laying no claim to be an educated man because he had a very
considerable knowledge of this branch of conchology, any more than
Butler considered it a title to culture that he had a completer
knowledge of Handel’s music than any living man, or probably any dead
one, including Handel himself.
Jackson strolled along the broad gravel path towards Butler’s rooms,
passing groups of undergraduates on the way, to some of whom, his own
pupils, he nodded; practically he knew none others, even by sight. Jim
and Birds were among those he knew, who, since smoking in the court was
forbidden, discreetly held their cigarettes behind their backs as Mr.
Jackson passed them. But though short-sighted, he had a keen sense of
smell, and pleasantly enough made a rather neat Latin quotation about
incense.
From Butler’s room came the loud resonance of a piano, which quite
drowned the noise of his knocking, and entering, he found that sardonic
colleague deeply engaged at his piano on the last movement of Handel’s
Occasional Overture. Butler’s method of playing was to put his face very
near the music, plant a firm foot on the loud pedal, and add the soft
pedal for passages marked _piano_. He preserved an iron and unshakable
tempo, counting the requisite number of beats to each bar in an audible
voice, and not stopping till he got to the end of his piece unless the
book fell off the music-rest, when he turned the page. When that
occurred, he continued counting while he picked it up.
To-night no such interruption occurred, and it was not till he had
reached the last loud chord that he observed Jackson’s appearance.
“That’s a glorious thing you were playing,” observed he pleasantly, as
he put his cap and gown in the window-seat. “Glorious. They can’t write
such music now.”
Butler gave a short sarcastic laugh.
“They can’t indeed,” he said. “Modern music is just trash: there’s no
other word for it. The other day when I was up in town I went--good
evening, Waters--I went to a concert in order to hear Handel’s violin
sonata, and had to sit through a piece of Debussy. If it hadn’t been for
the question of manners, I should have put back my head and howled like
a dog.”
“And had to grin like a dog instead,” suggested Waters, stroking his
short black beard, which was streaked with grey. The applicability of
the classical English epithet “silver-sabled” to his beard consoled him
for those signs of the middle years.
“No, I assure you, grinning was beyond me,” said this musical sufferer,
“though I admit the neatness of your quotation. It was a mere confused
noise like nothing so much as the protracted tuning of the orchestra.
But, it’s no use getting angry with stuff that doesn’t merit the
faintest attention.”
Jackson put his head on one side, his favourite attitude when
pronouncing critical judgments.
“I’m not altogether so sure that I agree with you,” he said, “I’m not
speaking about Debussy because I’ve never heard of him before, but I
think some modern music is uncommonly fine. But you’re such a confounded
purist, my dear fellow.”
“Certainly I can’t find time for the second best,” said Butler. “There’s
nothing been written in the last fifty years that has a chance of
living.”
“A sweeping statement, rather,” said Waters. “I was considerably
impressed by the festival at Bayreuth two years ago: in fact I’m going
again in August. There are certain parts of _Tristan and Isolde_ that
are very moving. Can’t I persuade you to come with me?”
Jackson laughed.
“Not if you were Peitho herself would you persuade him,” he said. “What
was that phrase of yours, Butler, when you heard _Tristan_ in London.
‘Three hours of neurasthenic cacophany,’ I think you called it.”
“I believe I did,” said Butler, gratified that his dictum should be
remembered. “But if I did, I understated it. Ah, here is our coffee: I
wonder why Alison doesn’t come.”
“He went to see the Master about something connected with the May-week
concert,” said Waters. “He told us he might be a little late. I can’t
quite agree with our host about Wagner, but I do cordially agree with
him that there’s a cult of the incompetent sprung up, who make up for
their want of artistic ability by sheer bizarre impertinence. Debussy I
make no doubt is one of them (though like Jackson I never heard a note
of him), and the modern impressionists and post-impressionists and
cubists are others. If I may adapt Butler’s phrase I should have no
hesitation in describing their canvasses as ‘Three feet of neurasthenic
daubings.’ But of course their scribblings are merely _pour rire_.”
Jackson put his head on one side again.
“I don’t know that there’s much more to be said for any modern art,” he
answered. “I myself am unable to give even the most admired modern
painters a place in the pictorial tripos. Sargent, for instance: I don’t
consider his portraits more than mere posters, pieces of scenic painting
if you will, dabbed on, without any finish, like a copy of Greek prose
without any accents. Ha, here’s Alison: now we’ll get to work.”
It was curious to note now, immediately on the advent of the players to
make up their table at whist, all these lesser problems and
pronouncements with regard to the position of Wagner, Sargent and
Debussy in the realms of art were immediately dismissed for the greater
preoccupation. For those middle-aged men, in spite of their
gently-fossilized existence, their indulgent contempt for anything that
was not immediately “Cambridge,” their general pessimism about modern
effort, retained a certain streak of boyishness and gusto, in that they
were genuinely fond of games, both the milder and more sedentary ones
that they themselves played, and those better suited to the robust
vigour of their pupils, accepting the importance of them as a clause in
the creed that made Cambridge just precisely what it was. Their theories
about them, just as about education, might be all cut and dried, and the
sap as completely be gone out of them as out of the pressed flowers in
some botancial collection (which they would unanimously have alluded to
as a Hortus Siccus), but they did believe in them.
There was no elasticity or any possible growth or development that could
come to those fibrous stems and crackling petals, but they believed in
their creed and would have opposed with tooth and nail of conviction any
suggested reform or innovation. For Cambridge, so long as the forts of
classics and cricket stood secure, was to them an institution as abiding
as the moon, and no criticism concerning it could be taken seriously,
any more than you could take seriously a person who said that he would
have preferred the colour of the moon to be pea-green or magenta. But
Cambridge could only remain a permanent and perfect phenomenon, if it
remained exactly as it was. Whatever in the world of flux and change
might alter and crumble, Cambridge must present an unalterable front to
the corroding centuries. Whatever change came there, must, in the very
nature of things, be a change for the worse.
Of the great ancient fortress of Cambridge, St. Stephen’s College was
beyond doubt the most impregnable bastion. Founded by Henry VII., it had
had a glorious record of opposition to every reform and innovation that
had assaulted its grey walls. When first railways began to knit England
together, St. Stephen’s had headed every defensive manœuvre to keep
their baleful facilities away from the sanctuary. St. Stephen’s
collective spirit did not wish to “run up” to London in two or three
hours: it preferred the sequestering methods of the stage-coach. Till
some forty years ago it had consisted entirely of fellows and
undergraduates who had been scholars of St. Stephen’s School, and at the
conclusion of their enjoyment of Henry VII.’s endowment there, proceeded
for the rest of their lives, if so disposed, to be supported by Henry
VII. at St. Stephen’s College. They entered it as scholars, became
fellows in due course, and taught to the succeeding generation precisely
what they had learned.
Then had come that overwhelming assault on the tradition of centuries,
which our four whist-players thought bitterly of even till to-day, when
the college was thrown open to boys from other schools who, instead of
necessarily taking up classics, went in for all sorts of debased
subjects such as natural science and medicine. But there was no help for
it: that particular gate of the bastion had to be opened, and scientists
moral and physical, even students of modern languages, mingled with the
white-robed classical choir. But the spirit of the more loyal-hearted
portion of the garrison remained unbroken, and sturdily, long after the
rest of Cambridge blazed with electric light, St. Stephen’s, owing
chiefly to the determined stand made by Jackson and Butler, moved in its
accustomed dusk of candles and oil lamps.
The introduction of bath-rooms provoked a not less gallant opposition:
in the time of Henry VII. hot baths were unheard of, and if nowadays you
wanted one, you could get a can of hot water from the kitchen. And it
was only under the severest pressure that those debasing paraphernalia
squeezed their way in. Not for a moment is it implied that Jackson and
his friends were like bats who preferred the dark, or like cats who
disliked water, but only that they disliked any change, and preferred
things precisely as they were....
The game proceeded in the utmost harmony and with academic calm, and was
interspersed with neat quotations. For instance, when at the conclusion
of a hand, Waters said approvingly to his partner, “You saw my call all
right,” Jackson without a moment’s thought replied, “Yes, Waters, one
clear call for me.” Or when hearts were trumps, and Butler proved only
to have one of that suit, he paused, without applying his lit match to
his pipe, to say, “_Eructavit cor meum_.” As that one happened to be the
ace, it was quickly and sharply that Alison said, “But your heart is
inditing of a _good_ matter.” Even when apt quotation failed, something
academic was fragrant in their most ordinary remarks, as when, spades
being turned up as trumps for the third time running, Butler referred to
“the prevalence of those agricultural implements,” or when his partner
found that his hand contained seven diamonds, he called it “a jewel
song.” There was not one atom of pose or desire for effect in those
little _mots_, their minds thought like that, and their tongues
faithfully expressed their impressions.
The third of these pleasant rubbers came to an end about a quarter to
eleven, and, a “senatus consultum” being taken, it was resolved not to
begin a new one, but to relax into conversation.
“_Non semper arcum_,” said Butler, rising. “Ho, everyone that thirsteth,
you will help yourselves, please. I think you said, Alison, that when we
had finished Sarah Battling, you wanted to tell us what the Master spoke
to you about.”
Alison was busy making a curious drink that he found refreshing, which
was a mixture of port and soda water (called Alison’s own) in exactly
equal proportions. There must be just as much port as there was water,
neither more nor less, else some recondite flavour was missed. He was a
man of about forty-five, clean-shaven and alert: his great acquirement
was an inward knowledge of Cicero’s letters so amazing, that when once
he set a piece of Latin translation in a college examination, composed
not at all by Cicero, but by himself, even the Master had been deceived,
and asked him out of which of Cicero’s letters he had taken that piece.
In other respects he played lawn-tennis, and was responsible, as
precentor, for the music of the College services in chapel.
“Yes, it is a matter of some importance,” he said. “The Choral Society,
of course, are giving their annual sacred concert in chapel during
May-week, and they have most unfortunately selected Elgar’s ‘Dream of
Gerontius’ for performance. The Master tells me that he is inclined
absolutely to refuse to give permission for it, but asked me first to
consult some of you. I told him I should meet you three to-night, and he
said that he desired no better subcommittee.”
“Is his objection to it on the score of Elgar, Elgar’s score one might
say,” asked Butler, “or on that of Gerontius? If on that of the
composer, I am disposed to agree with him. I know nothing about
Gerontius, as a literary production, except that a hymn which we
occasionally sing in chapel with a vulgar tune, is excerpted from it, I
believe.”
Jackson chuckled.
“On the score of Elgar, Elgar’s score,” he repeated. “Very neat, Butler.
I know the hymn you mean, ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height.’ It goes
admirably into Greek iambics.”
“Equally well into Latin elegiacs,” said Alison. “No, the Master has no
feeling against Elgar’s music: that wasn’t his point. But he could not
see himself permitting the performance in chapel of a libretto so
markedly, so pugnaciously Roman Catholic. I am bound to confess that
there’s something to be said for his view. What do you say, Jackson? You
are our spiritual pastor.”
Jackson took his stand by the fire-place, and put his head on one side.
“Well, if I’m bound to speak as from a rostrum,” he said, “I shall be
disposed to ask for notice of that question. It’s an uncommonly nice
point, and the question, of course, on which it all hinges is how far
the purpose of a libretto is extinguished by being treated musically. I
remember going to see Gounod’s _Faust_, of which the libretto contains
some frankly intolerable situations. But somehow when treated musically
they did not strike me as actually indecent.”
“The indecency of the music would be enough for me,” said Butler
incisively. “Nothing else but that would strike me.”
“Ah, there’s our purist again. But just now the question is not so much
of Purism as Puritanism.”
“After all, we sing ‘Praise to the Holiest’ in chapel,” remarked Alison.
“I have known the Master join in it.”
Butler drew in his breath with a hissing inspiration as of pain at that
recollection.
“Yes, yes, sufficient unto the day--usually Trinity Sunday--is the
Master’s singing of that hymn,” he remarked. “If the Master proposed to
sing the whole of the ‘Dream of Gerontius’ himself I would be steadfast
in prayer that it should not be given at all. But he has not threatened
that, I gather.”
Waters extracted a few crumbs of biscuit that had fallen in his
silver-sabled beard.
“I think Jackson has hit the nail on the head,” he remarked. “The
question is how far music purges the libretto. In my view it doesn’t: it
merely emphasizes it. Another appeal, the musical, is added. I admit the
inconsistency of singing a hymn that comes out of Gerontius, but you do
not remedy that inconsistency by adding to it the far greater one of
giving, as Alison neatly phrased it, a pugnaciously Roman Catholic work
in a Church of England chapel.”
“And those who vote for the motion, that is the exclusion of Gerontius?”
asked Alison.
He counted hands.
“The ayes have it,” he announced. “I think we may conclude that
Gerontius will have to seek another dormitory.”
“To sleep, perchance to dream,” suggested Waters.
* * * * *
This point being settled, the unrest in Ireland and possible Labour
troubles were lightly touched on, but such subjects had very little
concern for these sheltered lives, and presently, even before Alison had
drunk his tumbler of Alison’s Own, more exhilarating topics came under
discussion. There was a proposal to be brought by some Junior Don at the
next College meeting that the dinner hour should, during the summer
months, be postponed, from 7.30 till 8; this aroused Butler’s gloomiest
apprehensions.
“That young Mackenzie is a most undesirable man,” he said. “We made a
great mistake when we elected him to a Fellowship.”
“Considering the degrees he took,” said Jackson. “A first in mathematics
one year, a first in mechanical science the next, and a fellowship
dissertation which appears to be the most valuable contribution ever
made to the subject of engines for aeroplanes, I don’t see what else we
could do. I regretted the necessity as much as you.”
“I refuse to admit the necessity,” said Butler. “As the greatest
classical college of the University, what have we to do with aeroplanes?
I hope it is not our business to further the exploitation of mechanical
toys.”
Jackson assumed the “rostrum” again.
“I don’t altogether agree with you,” he said, “about their being
mechanical toys. There may be something in them after all. But I do
agree with you that the study and construction of them should be
conducted at their proper place and not at a University. One of
Mackenzie’s gliders, or so I think he calls them, came sailing in
yesterday through the open window of my lecture-room, followed a moment
afterwards by Mackenzie himself without a word of apology. I think,
however, he caught my next sentence, ‘After this most unseemly
interruption’.... He was meant to in any case. I had a good mind to
chuck a Thucydides through the window of his lecture-room and see what
he made of that.”
“He wouldn’t make much of Thucydides,” said Butler witheringly. “He said
to me the other day that he thanked God he hadn’t wasted a minute of his
life in learning Greek. Latin he appeared to have learned for his own
amusement: he liked reading Horace, he told me.”
“Turning the classics into a mere hobby,” said Waters, “and reading, I
make no doubt, without notes or a dictionary, much as you read a French
novel.”
“Amazing!” said Jackson, with his head on one side. “And the worst of it
all is that he seems to have got some sort of hold over the
undergraduates which is altogether irregular and unseemly. They talk to
him as if he was a slightly senior undergraduate himself. No sort of
good can come out of such relationships. A don is a teacher, and an
undergraduate is a learner. They must both keep their proper places or
the whole University system is undermined.”
“That’s the danger in having young men as fellows,” said Alison, “who
have no sense of their positions and dignity. There’s too much of that
sort of thing. And it’s the same at other colleges.”
Jackson took up his cap and gown.
“Well, I think we know how to put a pretty firm foot down on it here,”
he said. “Master Mackenzie will find that his gliders and his dinner at
eight aren’t looked very warmly on. By the way, young Linnet played a
fine innings the other day against Middlesex, and he showed me up an
uncommonly good piece of Greek prose this week. Cricket and Greek. I
wish the undergraduates would stick to them. Then we shouldn’t have much
bother with fellows like Mackenzie.”
Waters took his watch from his pocket and absently wound it up, instead
of looking at the time.
“I was dipping into a play by that obscene Scandinavian dramatist the
other day,” he said, “and found a line about the younger generation
knocking at the door. _Hedda Gabler_ was it?--anyhow there was a vast
lot of gabble.”
“Obscene?” said Alison. “Isn’t that rather a strong word?”
“It was rather strong stuff: that is why I chose the word.”
“I should have said that piffle was nearer the mark,” said Jackson with
an air of complete finality.
“I beg to second that motion, if we’re talking about Ibsen,” said
Butler. “But I propose as an amendment that we don’t talk about Ibsen.
Why talk about Ibsen?”
“Well, we won’t,” said Waters. “I delete the obscene Scandinavian, and
remark on my own account that the younger generation does seem to me to
be knocking at the door.”
Jackson put on his gown.
“Sport your oak, then, my dear fellow,” he said, “and go on with your
Plato. And shut your windows against Mackenzie’s gliders. Cambridge is
all right, there’s life in the old dog yet, and a good set of teeth too,
if there’s going to be any question of its dinner. Well, I must go. Very
pleasant evening, Butler. Good-night, all of you.”
His firm step descended the uncarpeted flight of stairs outside in
gradual diminuendo, and Alison, as it was Saturday night, took another
glass of “his own,” before going to bed.
“Linnet’s a very attractive fellow,” he said. “I like both him and
Lethbridge. But some of those first and second year men are rather a
poisonous lot. You know the crew I mean, they run that new paper called
_Camouflage_.”
“_Camouflage?_” asked Butler.
“Yes, French word, with an allusion to the Cam, I conjecture. I looked
it up in a dictionary. It’s the art of concealment with intent to
deceive, to put it generally. ‘Evasion,’ you might possibly render it by
‘Evasion.’ Haven’t you come across the paper?”
“I am afraid that my reading does not embrace those usually very callow
periodicals,” said Butler. “Pray widen my restricted horizon.”
“Well, I have glanced at a number or two of it. I should suppress it if
I was the Vice-Chancellor, but I don’t deny it’s got a good deal of
cleverness. It’s all misdirected cleverness. There was a really very
neat piece of Platonic dialogue directed against the teaching of
classical languages. There was an interview in the style of the _Daily
Mail_ with Villon, that French vagabond rhymster, you know. There was
also a poem called ‘Ode to a Pair of Trousers’ couched in Swinburnian
language of almost licentious passion. The key to it lay in the last
stanza, in which you found out that it was supposed to be written by the
poet on a frosty morning after a cold bath. That explained the ‘softness
of thy warm embrace, the clinging of thy leg,’ and the rest of it. The
poet merely wanted to get his clothes on again. Rather neat, rather in
the C.S.C. style.”
“I cannot at the moment recall anything of Calverley’s that seems to
resemble your very vivid précis,” said Butler icily. “And with your
permission, I think I will not invest money or time in the purchase and
perusal of _Camouflage_. But without hearing more I am completely in
accord with your inclination to suppress it.”
Alison’s second indulgence in port and water had roused him to a certain
Liberalism that usually hibernated.
“I wish sometimes we could get more into touch with the undergraduates,”
he said. “We know about their games to some extent, and we know what
their classical reading consists of, and we look over their
compositions. But there our knowledge of them and their education
abruptly ceases, unless they get into trouble through not keeping
chapels, or making a row, or smoking in the quadrangle. You, for
instance, just now, Butler, wanted to know no more about _Camouflage_ or
its authors.”
Butler poured himself out a glass of whisky and soda. This, too, was in
celebration of Saturday night.
“My dear fellow,” he said, “your admirable description of the Ode was
quite enough for me as regards _Camouflage_. I should like it
immediately suppressed. As for the authors, you yourself said they were
a poisonous lot.”
“I know I did. But I wonder if one could not learn more about the
poison, and perhaps supply an antidote. Indeed, what if it isn’t
poison?”
“I am content to take your word that it is,” said Butler, yawning.
Conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they,
to his mind, whom Cambridge connoted. Cambridge meant to him the life
lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the
gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the
leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. Naturally
his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent
that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary
rebuked.
But more advanced ideas still floated vaguely in Alison’s mind, as he
rose to go.
“Sometimes I have certain doubts about our educational system,” he
observed.
“Get rid of them,” said Butler, booming from his impregnable fortress.
* * * * *
While this decorous pleasure-party of the Olympians was in progress,
another by no means less pleasurable, though far less Olympian, had been
going on partly in Birds’s room, partly in Jim’s, just across the
passage. Two or three people had strolled in to see Birds after Hall,
two or three more to see Jim, with the effect that there had been an
amalgamation and a game of poker. Those who did not care to play poker,
refreshed themselves with cigarettes and conversation and whisky and
soda, and a rather neat booby-trap had been set over the door into
Birds’s bedroom. Jelf of the poisonous set, and editor of _Camouflage_,
had devised this, and subsequently forgetting about it, and going into
Birds’s bedroom to fetch another glass, had got caught by it himself,
and was now brushing carbolic tooth powder out of his hair. Then Birds,
who at the moment was playing poker in Jim’s room, had come in, and by
way of reprisal had thrown the rest of the tooth-powder in Jelf’s face,
who had sneezed without intermission for ten minutes.
But the ragging had not gone further than that, and now the party had
broken up, leaving only Jelf and Badsley with the owners of the rooms.
Jelf was a tall, merry-faced, ugly boy, whose hair when not pink with
tooth-powder was black. He wore it long and lanky, with the design,
which perfectly succeeded, of annoying those who conformed to the custom
of short hair. He wore extraordinarily shabby clothes and professed
views of the wildest immorality for analogous reasons.
“And if I find long black hairs in my brush to-morrow,” said Birds,
alluding to these incidents, “I shall make you eat them. Why don’t you
get your hair cut like ordinary people?”
“Because then I should no longer annoy ordinary people. I say,
_Camouflage_ is going to be lovely next week. I’ve written a defence of
Polygamy. There’s a polygamous tribe in West Africa whose average length
of life is seventy-eight. I attribute that to polygamy.”
“Don’t believe it,” said Birds.
“You haven’t read my article yet, so you don’t know. It’s style that
makes you believe things, and I’ve put it very convincingly with
quotations from Taylor’s ‘Anthropology’ and the ‘Golden Bough,’ and
Legros’ Travels. No one will turn the passages up, and if they did they
wouldn’t find them, because they don’t exist. But it’s all damned
scientifically put.”
“Do you mean you made the whole thing up?” asked Jim.
“Yes, my child. As I say, it’s all a question of style. You’ll believe
it all right. And then there’s another rather neat rag, if you’ll
promise not to tell anybody.”
“Right.”
“I’ve printed a French poem by Victor Hugo, and signed it with my
initials.”
“What’s the point?”
“Why, I shall take a copy very diffidently to Butler, and ask him what
he thinks of my French. And I bet you five to one that he says that I
had better learn prosody before I attempt to write French verse, or
words to that effect. Anyone take it?”
It seemed so perfectly certain that Butler would say words to that
effect that not the wildest gambler would entertain such a hazard.
“And then you’ll tell him?” asked Jim.
“Of course not, but it’ll leak out somehow. I shall tell Mackenzie and
he’ll do the rest. I wonder why the dons object to me so much? At least,
I know why. They think I’m pulling their sacred legs. The Ode to the
Trousers annoyed them awfully. They thought it was going to be obscene,
and suffered a bitter disappointment.”
Robin sat down on the floor.
“Don’t see what you’re playing at,” he said. “It’s perfectly easy to be
unpopular, and you take such a lot of trouble about it.”
“There you’re wrong,” said Jelf. “You couldn’t be unpopular if you
tried, Birds. Your hair is nice and short and you’ve a clean face and
shave every morning, and play cricket and are exactly like everybody
else.”
“Sooner be like that than like you,” said Robin politely.
“You couldn’t be like me, if you tried, simply because you can’t think
for yourself. You accept all that you’ve been brought up in, like a dear
little good boy, eating the dinner that’s given him, and saying his
grace afterwards. Being born an Englishman together with Eton and
Cambridge has made you precisely what you are, which is exactly the same
as Badders and Jim. You do what you’re told without ever asking why.
Britannia rules the waves, and church is at eleven on Sunday morning,
but you may play lawn-tennis in the afternoon.”
Jelf got up and waved his arms wildly.
“You’re all cast in one mould,” he said, “and Lord, how I should like to
break it. Here you sit, you and Badders and Jim, and Badders is going to
be a schoolmaster, because his father was, and Jim is going to be a
clergyman for the same reason, and you’re going to be a bloody lord.
Gosh! That’s why you get on so well, simply because you never think. And
you never think because you can’t. Happy England! Our national stupidity
is the basis of our national prosperity.”
“That comes out of ‘Intentions,’” remarked Badsley.
“I daresay it does, but anyhow, they’re not good intentions, which are
invariably fatal. But none of you have got any intentions at all, except
to be smug and comfortable and stereotyped. There’s Badders with his
girls, and Birds with his cricket, and Jim--well, I don’t know what
Jim’s with. He’s usually with Birds.”
“After all, we seem to annoy you without taking any trouble about it,”
remarked Badsley, “and you have to take a great deal of trouble to annoy
anybody. You’ve got to grow your hair long, and copy out Victor Hugo,
and run a paper that nobody reads.”
“But I can’t help it: I must make a protest against respectability.
Respectability carried to such a pitch as St. Stephen’s carries it to is
simply indecent. Nobody ever gets drunk except me, and I not frequently
because I hate feeling unwell afterwards. It’s so degrading to be sick
even in a good cause. Why don’t we keep mistresses? Why does nobody do
anything that he shouldn’t according to collegiate standards? Atheism
too: Why no atheists? And all the time I’ve got a horrible feeling that
I’m really just the same as any of you.”
“You need not, I assure you,” said Birds in the Butler voice, “be under
any mistaken misapprehensions about that.”
“But I am. I argue and protest, but at bottom----”
“Oh, kick it, somebody,” said Badsley.
Jim went and stood in front of the fireplace with his head on one side.
“The question is how we shall make Jelf more like us,” he said. “Shall
we begin by cutting his hair or shaving him, or----”
There was a wild rush across the room and Jelf jumped out of the window
on to the grass outside.
“Cowards!” he said, and ran to his room and locked himself in.
Birds, who had just failed to catch Jelf before he jumped out of the
window, came back into the room.
“And the rum thing is that though he talks such awful piffle, he’s about
right,” he said. “We don’t think. I say, his Victor Hugo rag is rather a
good one.”
“Top-hole. But what is there to think about except the things that
everybody thinks about?”
“Dunno. But somehow he finds them. Do you remember when there was flue
here before Easter, and he went round with a handcart and a bell,
calling out, ‘Bring out your dead’? That did me a lot of good.”
Badsley yawned.
“I’m going to be a schoolmaster because the governor is,” he remarked,
“and Jim’s going to be a clergyman, and Birds is going to be a lord.
Jelf’s about right. And to-morrow will be Sunday, so I’m going to bed
to-day!”
Birds and Jim were left alone, and Birds began undressing.
“I think I shall begin by being an atheist,” he said. “How am I to
start? But it is true that we all do what everybody else does. Are you
going to breakfast with me to-morrow, or I with you? I forget whose turn
it is.”
“Yours. And we can’t think, at least I can’t. If I sat down to think I
shouldn’t know what to think about. All the same----”
Jim took a turn up and down the room, trying to frame words to the idea
in his mind.
“He’s rather Puck-like, is Jelf,” he said. “I don’t think he’s really
human. He thinks that people who aren’t epigrammatic, don’t feel. I
doubt if he likes anybody--really likes, I mean. You aren’t good for
much if you don’t.”
“That’s what makes him want to pull things down,” said Birds, following
vaguely the train of thought. “He can destroy all right; he makes you
think nothing’s up to much. But he doesn’t give you anything instead.
Lord! I wish I’d been a bit quicker and caught him before he went
through the window.”
He strolled whistling away into his own room.