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LIMITATIONS.
“Is it,” he asked, "because of the little tiny spark of the Divine
which men have within them that we care for them, or because they
are human not divine, limited not immeasurable, faulty not
perfect?”
And the Professor of Ignorance, as usual, sat silent, wishing to
hear what the others had to say about it, rather than to speak
himself.
“_The Professor of Ignorance._”
Limitations.
_A NOVEL._
BY
E. F. BENSON,
AUTHOR OF “DODO,” ETC.
THIRD EDITION.
LONDON:
A. D. INNES & CO.,
BEDFORD STREET.
1896.
LIMITATIONS.
CHAPTER I.
Tom Carlingford was sitting at his piano, in his rooms at King’s
College, Cambridge, playing the overture to _Lohengrin_ with the most
indifferent success. It was a hot night in the middle of August, and he
was dressed suitably, if not elegantly, in a canvas shirt, a pair of
flannel trousers, and socks. He had no tie on, and he was smoking a
meerschaum bowl of peculiarly spotted appearance, through a long
cherry-wood stem. The remains of a nondescript meal laid coldly on the
table, and a cricket-bag on the hearth-rug, seemed to indicate that he
had been away playing cricket, and had got back too late for hall. The
piano was almost as disreputable in appearance as its master, for it
stood in a thorough draught, between the windows opening on to the front
lawn and the door opening into the smaller sitting-room, and the
guttering candle was making a fine stalactite formation of wax on D in
alt. Several good pictures and college photographs hung on the walls,
and between the windows stood a small bookcase, suspiciously tidy. Tom
played with the loud pedal down, and treated his hands in the way in
which we are told we should bestow our alms. D in alt had stuck fast to
C sharp and C, and the effect, when either of these three notes was
played, was extremely curious. However, he finished the overture after a
fashion, and got up.
“This is a red-letter day for Wagner,” he remarked. “What do you do with
pipes when they get leprous, Teddy?” he asked, looking dubiously at the
meerschaum bowl.
“I sit down and do Herodotus,” remarked a slightly irritated voice from
the window-seat, behind the lamp.
“I don’t think that’s any use,” said Tom.
“Perhaps you’ve never tried it. I wish to goodness you’d sit quiet for
ten minutes, and let me work!”
Tom walked up to the lamp, and examined the pipe more closely.
“It is as spotted and ringstraked as Jacob’s oxen,” he remarked. “Teddy,
do stop working! It’s after eleven, and you said you’d stop at eleven.”
“And if you inquire what the reason for----” murmured Teddy.
“I never inquired the reason,” interrupted Tom. “I don’t want to know.
Do stop! You’re awfully unsociable!”
“Five minutes more,” said Ted inexorably.
Tom took a turn up and down the room, and whistled a few bars of a
popular tune. Then he took up a book, yawned prodigiously, and read for
the space of a minute and a quarter, lying back in a long basket-chair.
“What the use of my learning classics is, I don’t know,” he remarked.
“I’m not going to be a schoolmaster or a frowsy don.”
“No, we can’t all be schoolmasters or frowsy dons, any more than we can
all be sculptors,” said the voice from the window-seat vindictively.
Tom laughed.
“Dear old boy, I mean no reflection on you. You’ll be a capital don, if
you succeed in getting a fellowship, and it will always be a consolation
to you to know that you probably won’t be as frowsy as some of your
colleagues. I can’t think how you can possibly contemplate teaching
Latin prose to a lot of silly oafs like me for the remainder of your
mortal life.”
“You must remember that all undergraduates aren’t such fools as you.”
“That’s quite true; but some are much more unpleasant. They are, really;
it’s no use denying it.”
Ted shut his books, and looked meditatively out on to the court through
the intervening flower-box, filling his pipe the while, and Tom, finding
he got no answer, continued--
“And I suppose, in course of time, they’ll make you a dean. That’s a
jolly occupation! Eight a.m. on a winter’s morning. And the warming
apparatus of the chapel is defective. Furthermore, you must remember
that those are the dizzy heights to which you will rise, if you are
successful; if not, you will have spent the six best years of your life
in writing about the deliberative subjunctive, and, at the end, have
the consolation of being told that the electors considered your
dissertation very promising, but unfortunately there was no vacancy for
you. They will also recommend you to publish it, and it will be cut up
in the _Classical Review_, by a Dead Sea ape with bleary eyes and a bald
head, who will say you are an ignoramus, and had better read his grammar
before you write one of your own. Oh, it’s a sweet prospect! It is
grammar you do, isn’t it?”
“No; but it doesn’t matter,” said Ted. “Go on.”
“How a sensible man can contemplate spending his life in a place like
this, I cannot conceive,” said Tom. “It’s the duty of every man to knock
about a bit, and learn that the outer darkness does not begin at
Cambridge Station. There is a place called London, and there are other
places called Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.”
“And Australia. Do you propose to go to them all?” asked Ted. “It’s a
new idea, isn’t it? Yesterday you said that, as soon as you went down,
you were going to bury yourself at home for five years, and work. Why is
Applethorpe so much better than Cambridge?”
“Why?” said Tom. “The difference lies in me. I shall continue to be
aware of the existence of other countries, and other interests. Great
heavens! I asked Marshall to-day, in an unreflective moment, if he knew
Thomas Hardy, and he said, ‘No; when did he come up?’ And Marshall is a
successful, valuable man, according to their lights here. He’s a tutor,
and he collects postmarks. That’s what you may become some day. My hat,
what a brute you will be!”
Ted Markham left the window-seat, and came and stood on the hearth-rug.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not necessary to vegetate because
you live here, and it’s not necessary to be unaware of the existence of
Hardy because you know Thucydides. I don’t want fame in the way you want
it in the least. I haven’t the least desire to make a splash, as you
call it. It seems to me that one can become educated, in your sense of
the word, simply by living and seeing people. It doesn’t really help you
to live in a big town, and have five hundred acquaintances instead of
fifty.”
“No, I know,” said Tom, “but as a matter of experience, of men who
settle down here, a larger proportion are vegetables than should be.
They want to be the authorities on gerunds, or Thucydides, or supines in
_-um_, or binomial theorems, or acid radicals, and they get to care for
nothing else. If there were only a dozen fellowships reserved for men
who didn’t mean to work at anything, it would be all right, but when
every one cares for his own line more than anything else, you get a want
of proportion. Collectively they care for nothing but lines,
individually each for his own line. And, after all, lines are a very
small part of life. What difference would it make to any one if there
was no such thing as the deliberative subjunctive?”
Markham did not reply for a moment.
“No one supposes it would,” he said, after a pause, “but you must
remember that grammar is not necessarily uninteresting because it
doesn’t interest you. In any case let’s walk down to the bridge.”
“All right. Where are my shoes, and my coat? Ah, I’m sitting on it!”
Tom’s rooms were on the ground floor on the side of the court facing the
chapel. The moon had risen in a soft blue sky, and as they stepped into
the open air they paused a moment.
The side of the chapel opposite them was bathed in whitest light, cast
obliquely on to it, and buttresses and pinnacles were outlined with
shadows. The great shield-bearing dragons perched high above the little
side-chapels stood out clear-lined and fantastic from their backgrounds,
and the great crowned roses and portcullis beneath them looked as if
they were cut in ivory and ebony. The moon caught a hundred uneven
points in the windows, giving almost the impression that the chapel was
lighted inside. To the east and west rose the four pinnacles dreamlike
into the vault of the sky. In front of them stretched the level
close-cut lawn looking black beneath the moonlight, and from the centre
came the gentle metallic drip of the fountain into its stone basin.
Towards the town the gas-lit streets shot a reddish glare through the
white light, and now and then a late cab rattled across the stone-lined
rails of the tramway. From the left there came from the rooms of some
musically minded undergraduate the sound of a rich, fruity voice,
singing, “I want no star in heaven to guide me,” followed by “a
confused noise within,” exactly as if some one had sat down on the
piano.
Tom murmured, “I want no songs by Mr. Tosti,” drew his hand through
Markham’s arm, and they strolled down together towards the river.
“Of course I don’t mean that you’ll become like Marshall,” he said, “but
it does make me wild to think of the lives some of these people lead.
They don’t care for anything they should care about, and even if they do
care about it, they never let you know it, or talk of it. Oh, Teddy,
don’t become a vegetable!”
“And yet when I came up,” said Markham, “my father used to write me
letters, asking me about my new impressions, and this fresh world that
was opening round me, and there really wasn’t any fresh world opening
round me, and I didn’t have any new impressions of any sort. It seemed
to me like any other place--and I was expected to feel the bustle and
the stir, and the active thought, and temptations, and I don’t know what
beside.”
“O Lord!” sighed Tom. “I know just the sort of thing. I don’t know if
there is any bustle and stir, and active thought, but I certainly never
came across them. Doesn’t the _Cambridge Review_ call itself the
‘Journal of University Life and Thought?’ Meditate on that a moment. As
for temptations, the only temptations I know of are not to be dressed by
eight, not to go to Sunday morning chapel, and not to work from nine
till two. But I’ve been acquainted with all those temptations all my
life, except that one had to be up by 7.30 at Eton. The temptations, in
fact, are less severe here.”
“I don’t know how it is,” said Ted, “but whenever people write books
about Cambridge, they make the bad undergraduates go to gambling hells
on the Chesterton Road, and the good ones be filled with ennobling
thoughts when they contemplate their stately chapel. Did you ever go to
a gambling hell on the Chesterton Road, Tom?”
“No; do you ever have ennobling thoughts when you look at the stately
chapel? Of course you don’t. You think it’s deuced pretty, and so do I,
and we both play whist with threepenny points; and as a matter of fact
we don’t fall in love with each other’s cousins at the May races, nor do
we sport deans into their rooms, nor do deans marry bedmakers. Oh, we
are very ordinary!”
“I feel a temptation to walk across the grass,” said Ted.
“Yes, you’re the wicked B.A. who leads the fresh, bright
undergraduate--that’s me--into all sorts of snares. What fools people
are!”
Tom sat on the balustrade of the bridge and lit a pipe. The match burned
steadily in the still night air.
“Now, Teddy, listen,” he said, and he dropped it over into the black
water. There was a moment’s silence as it fell through the air; then a
sudden subdued hiss as the red-hot dottel was quenched.
“I wonder if you know how nice that is,” said Tom. “I don’t believe you
enjoy that sort of thing a bit.”
“Dropping matches into the river?” asked Markham. “No, I don’t know that
I care for it very much.”
“Oh, it’s awfully nice,” said Tom. “Here goes another. There--that
little hiss after the silence. Fusees would be even better. No; you
haven’t got an artistic soul. Never mind; it would be dreadfully in your
way up here. Teddy, stop up here till the end of the month, and then
come and stay with us a bit. You needn’t shoot unless you like.”
“Yes, I shall stop up till the end, but I don’t know whether I can come
home with you. I ought to work.”
“What rot it is!” said Tom angrily. “You’ve been working for six months
quite continuously, and you think you can’t spare a week to be sociable
in. What on earth does your wretched work matter, if you do nothing
else? What is the good of a man who only works?”
“More good than a man who never works. But I agree with you, really.”
“Well, but you behave as if you didn’t think so,” said Tom. “The other
day you said you sympathized with that wretched grammarian in Browning,
who spent his whole life in settling the question of the Enclitic ἀν, or
some folly of that sort, and caught a cold on his chest in consequence,
and had integral calculus and tussis, and a hundred other things. Very
right and proper. Have you got any syphons? I wish for whisky. Well,
will you come home with me or not? I’m not going to press you.”
“No, I don’t want pressing. Yes, I’ll come. I should like to very much.
You leave one alone, which is the first quality of a host.”
They strolled up again, as the clock began to strike twelve.
“I’m sure I’ve done you much more good than you’d have got in an hour
out of your Herodotus,” said Tom. “There is one really good point about
you, and that is that if you are told something you think about it. I
shouldn’t wonder if I found you dropping matches into the Cam some night
soon.”
“It’s quite possible. Let’s see, what is the point of it?--the sudden
splash at the end of the silence, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is like so many things. It’s like a mole burrowing silently in
the earth, and then suddenly coming out at a different place. You
needn’t examine that analogy. It’s like what I am going to do. I’m going
to work very hard and quite silently for several years, and then
suddenly I’m going to make a splash.”
“But are you going out immediately afterwards--like the match?”
“I don’t know; perhaps I shall--who knows?”
“Tom, are you aware that we are talking exactly like the people in books
about Cambridge--the two friends, you know, who walk about on moonlight
nights, and meditate on life and being?”
“God forbid!” said Tom piously. “But we’d better go indoors, just to be
safe. Those people are so ridiculous only because they are always the
same. Of course we all _do_ meditate a little on life and being, but we
do other things besides. But they come out in the evening like rabbits
out of their burrow, and disappear again till the next evening. I’m
going to play cricket to-morrow. They never do that.”
“And drink whisky now. They never do that.”
“No. To drink whisky is next door to going to the gambling hell on the
Chesterton Road. Don’t go to bed yet. Come to my room.”
“I thought you wanted a syphon.”
“Yes; go and get one, will you, and bring it round.”
“Any more orders?” asked Markham.
“Oh yes,” said Tom--“some tobacco. I’ve run out.”
The Long Vacation Term was, so Tom thought, a really admirable
institution, and it might have been invented exclusively for him. None
of the colleges are more than half full, there are no lectures, and no
need of wearing caps and gowns. The usual things go on as usual, but in
a less emphatic manner. Those who wish to work do so, but not with any
sense of being ill-used if they are interrupted; college matches take
place, but they are not matters of first-class importance, or of
first-class cricket. There is a country-house atmosphere about the
place, an atmosphere of flannel trousers in the morning, of never being
in a hurry, of a good deal of slackly played lawn tennis, and going on
the river in canoes. This suited Tom very well, for he was more than
anything else an ambitious loafer, who might turn out a loafer without
ambition or an ambitious man. Successful loafing is not a gift to be
despised; it requires a certain amount of ability, for the successful
loafer must never be bored with doing nothing. Tom had quite enough
ability to be thoroughly successful in this line; he was clever,
artistic, original, and full of many interests, and in consequence he
loafed from year’s end to year’s end without ever wishing to do anything
else, though he meant to do other things often enough. He played games
well, but amateurishly, not taking them seriously enough to be
pre-eminent in anything from rowing down to chess, but finding amusement
in them, often playing a good innings at cricket when it was not wanted,
and given to slog at dangerous balls when it was particularly important
that he should keep his wicket up. “College matches in the Long,” as he
explained, were about his form.
He was for ever coming into harmless little collisions with the arm of
the academic law, being found in the streets after dark without cap or
gown, not from any wish to transgress the regulations which the
accumulated wisdom of generations had framed, but from considering in a
genial way, on each particular occasion, that it was a matter of no
importance. In the same way, if he more frequently walked across the
hallowed grass than he went round by the path, or if Mr. Carlingford’s
name was more often conspicuous by its absence than its presence from
the boards that told how many undergraduates attended lectures, he
evinced such frank surprise when the matter was brought home to him, was
so ready to express regret for what had happened, and so identified
himself with his tutor’s wish that it should not occur again, that the
offence seemed at once to appear in an almost wholly unobjectionable
light. He was now at the end of his second year at Cambridge, and the
prospects of his getting through a Tripos with any credit either to
himself or his teachers were small. His teachers regretted this more
probably than Tom himself, for they were quite aware of his ability, or
at least his power to do better than badly, while Tom was supremely
unconscious of it. He had been told that a Tripos was a test of merit,
and he accepted the fact cheerfully, even when coupled with the
assurance that he would probably only get a third. Tom drew the
inference that he was therefore a fool, and neither wished to dispute it
nor disprove it. He was, perhaps, conscious of a feeling that a great
many men who seemed to him to be extraordinarily dull took brilliant
degrees, and supposed that he was wrong in thinking them dull, or at any
rate that the abilities which ensured good degrees were compatible in
the same man with the extremes of social deficiencies. Meantime he made
admirable little sketches of his friends in the margin of his books, and
on sheets of paper during lecture hours; settled down to the belief that
his mission was to be a sculptor, and was almost surprised that the hour
had passed so soon. For the rest he was a young man of twenty-one, of
rather more than medium height, with an extraordinarily pleasant face
and a pair of honest brown eyes, which looked quite straight at you, and
always seemed to be glad to see you. He looked intensely English, and
pre-eminently clean among that race of clean men. Even Mr. Marshall,
about whom Tom has already hazarded an opinion, had been heard to say
that Carlingford was an uncommonly pleasant fellow, though he hardly
ever came to have his Latin prose looked over.
It was nearer ten o’clock than nine when Tom emerged half dressed from
his bedroom next morning, to find two or three cold pieces of bacon
waiting for him, which he inspected with an air of slight but resigned
curiosity. It really seemed so odd that this world should contain things
so undesirable as pieces of cold crinkled bacon; the reasons for their
existence were as unintelligible as the causes which produced centipedes
or deliberative subjunctives. Markham came in at this moment, for Tom
had said he was coming to work with him at half-past nine, but his face
expressed no surprise.
“Come in, old man,” said Tom. “I hate people who say ‘old man,’ don’t
you? Have you come to breakfast? That’s right. Sit down, and help
yourself. I’ve breakfasted ages ago, and I’m afraid the tea’s quite
cold. Never mind, I’ll make some more. You may think I’m foolish, but
it’s not so. As a matter of fact, I didn’t wake till half-past nine.
Make tea, Teddy; I’ll be ready in a minute.”
“I didn’t come here to make tea for you, but to work,” said Markham,
lighting the spirit-lamp.
“Well, you’re late, then,” said Tom; “you said you’d be here at
half-past nine, and it’s close on ten. And I wish it was eleven.”
“Why?”
“Because I should have shaved, and have eaten a little cold crinkled
bacon. Also perhaps have done a little work. But about that I can’t
say. By the way,” he called out from his bedroom, “Teddy!”
“Well?”
“I’m going to study the antique this morning in the Cast Museum. Come
too?”
“Rot!”
“What?”
“Rot!”
“Oh! This is rather a brilliant conversation, isn’t it? Well, I’m going
there really. Do come. You’ll see some pretty things. I wish I’d done
the Discobolus. I should have, if some one hadn’t thought of it first. I
shall do a man shying a cricket-ball. Pull the string and the model will
work.”
Tom emerged from his bedroom and sat down to the cold bacon.
“I shall complain of the cook,” he remarked. “This bacon is cold. I
didn’t order cold bacon. I’m not a hedger and ditcher. What are hedgers
and ditchers? Anyhow, they eat cold bacon in hedges and ditches. I’ve
seen them myself.”
“Perhaps you didn’t order your breakfast at three minutes to ten.”
“Don’t be snappy, Ted. But you’re quite right. I don’t know what they
mean by it. Was it you who came in here about half-past eight, and
knocked at my door?”
“No. I shouldn’t have stopped there. But I thought you said you didn’t
awake till after nine.”
“Oh, that was afterwards. I didn’t awake that time till after nine. You
see it was quite an accident that some one came in here at half-past
eight, and I couldn’t conscientiously count that. I’m sure you must see
that no one with any sense of honour could have taken advantage of
that.”
“No, it would have been hardly fair, would it?” said Markham dryly. “A
tricky sort of thing to do. Where did you say you were going to spend
the morning?”
“At the Archæological Museum. I went there yesterday for the first time.
They’ve got no end of casts. All the best Greek things, you know.”
“It won’t help you much in your Tripos, will it?”
“No, of course it won’t,” shouted Tom. “Good heavens, to hear you talk,
one would think that a man’s place in heaven was decided by his Tripos,
not to mention his place on earth! I’m not going to be a don or a
schoolmaster, as I told you last night----”
“Frowsy don,” said Markham.
“All right, frowsy don, and I don’t care a blow whether I get ploughed
or not. I don’t feel the least interest in any of the books I have to
read, so why should I read them?”
“Then why do you ever read at all?”
“Because dons and other people, like you, for instance, make such a fuss
if I don’t.”
Markham walked to the window and pulled up the blind, letting a great
hot square of sunshine in upon the carpet.
“I wonder at your considering that sufficient reason. Of course I’m
grateful for the compliment. Personally I should never think of doing a
thing because you would make a fuss if I did not.”
“Oh, go home, Teddy,” said Tom in cordial invitation. “You talk like
pieces for Latin prose. Look here, I’m going to the museum for an hour,
and then I shall come and work. This afternoon we play some
college--John’s, I think--on our ground. You said you’d play. We shall
begin at two sharp. Mind you work very hard all the morning, and try to
finish the fifth book of Herodotus--or whatever it is--before lunch. I
hope you always mark your book with a pencil, and if you find any
difficulties, bring them to me.”
Tom laid a paternal hand on Markham’s shoulder, and blew a smoke-ring at
him.
“And now I’m going to study the heathen antique. I wish you’d come. It
would really do you good. For me of course it’s necessary, as I’m going
to be a sculptor. Teddy, will you be my model for ‘The Academic Don’?
I’m going to do a statue of the academic don, a mixture of you and
Marshall and a few others--a type, you know, not an individual. That’s
always going to be my plan. I shall do a pedimental group, ‘Typical
Developments of Modern Dons.’ In the centre the don stands upright,
looking more or less like an ordinary man: then you see him beginning to
stoop, then sitting down, getting more and more like a vegetable at each
stage, and in the corner there will be two large decayed cauliflowers,
with fine caterpillars crawling all over them. In ten years you shall
sit for the cauliflower. Good-bye.”
Tom banged the door after him and went off to his museum, and there was
nothing left for Ted but to follow his advice and begin working, which
he did in a savage spirit. Like many rather silent, rather serious
people, he found a great stimulus in the presence of some one who, like
Tom, was hardly ever serious, and never silent. He made periodical
attempts to take Tom in hand, but, like most people who had tried to do
so, his efforts were not very successful. Tom had loafing in the blood,
and his ambitions did not run in the lines of Triposes. At the same time
it was owing to him that Tom had not at present failed very signally in
college examinations, for Ted had succeeded in making him work, if not
steadily, at least intermittently. Tom’s fits of intermittent work had
not, it is true, occurred very often, but when they did occur they
lasted sometimes for a week, of eight-hour days, and left him idler than
ever. But, from Ted’s point of view, a widely supported and seemingly
rational one--that men came up to the university partly at least to
work, and that examinations were the criterion whereby the success of
nine terms of residence was judged--these intermittent fits were better
than nothing, and when they were induced just before an examination they
led to results which, though superficial, were, according to the
standard he measured them by, tolerably satisfactory. Tom never
professed to feel the least interest in what he was working at, but
pressure would sometimes make him work; and a very vivid memory, though
one of short range, enabled him to reproduce the results of his week’s
cramming.
But Tom’s influence over his friend was of a much more personal and
vital kind. Ted looked on to the time when Tom should go down, and leave
him, as he hoped, to a permanent university life, with blankness. He
formed few friendships--and he had never been intimate with any one
before. Tom’s healthy, out-of-door sort of mind, coupled with his
artistic and picturesque ability, and his personal charm, had for him a
unique attraction. You may see an even further development of the same
phenomenon sometimes in the lower animals. A staid senior collie will
often strike up an intimacy with a frisky young kitten, though it is
hard to understand what the common ground between them is. The collie is
not happy without the kitten, but unfortunately the kitten is quite
happy without the collie--in fact, it would find the continuance of its
exclusive society a little tedious.