The Army Class “English,” which included the Upper Fifth, was trying
to keep awake; for “English” (Literature--Augustan epoch--eighteenth
century) came at last lesson, and that, on a blazing July afternoon,
meant after every one had been bathing. Even Mr. King found it hard to
fight against the snore of the tide along the Pebble Ridge, and spurred
himself with strong words.
Since, said he, the pearls of English Literature existed only to be
wrenched from their settings and cast before young swine rooting
for marks, it was his loathed business--in anticipation of the Army
Preliminary Examination which, as usual, would be held at the term’s
end, under the auspices of an official examiner sent down _ad hoc_--to
prepare for the Form a General Knowledge test-paper, which he would
give them next week. It would cover their studies up to date of the
Augustans and _King Lear_, which was the selected--and strictly
expurgated--Army Exam. play for that year. Now, English Literature,
as he might have told them, was _not_ divided into water-tight
compartments, but flowed like a river. For example, Samuel Johnson,
glory of the Augustans and no mean commentator of Shakespeare, was but
one in a mighty procession which----
At this point Beetle’s nodding brows came down with a grunt on the
desk. He had been soaking and sunning himself in the open sea-baths
built out on the rocks under the cliffs, from two-fifteen to four-forty.
The Army Class took Johnson off their minds. With any luck, Beetle
would last King till the tea-bell. King rubbed his hands and began to
carve him. He had gone to sleep to show his contempt (_a_) for Mr.
King, who might or might not matter, and (_b_) for the Augustans,
who, none the less, were not to be sneered at by one whose vast and
omnivorous reading, for which such extraordinary facilities had been
granted (this was because the Head had allowed Beetle the run of his
library), naturally overlooked such _epigonoi_ as Johnson, Swift,
Pope, Addison, and the like. Harrison Ainsworth and Marryat doubtless
appealed----
Even so, Beetle, salt-encrusted all over except his spectacles and
steeped in delicious languors, was sliding back to sleep again, when
“Taffy” Howell, the leading light of the Form, who knew his Marryat as
well as Stalky did his Surtees, began in his patent, noiseless whisper:
“‘Allow me to observe--in the most delicate manner in the world--just
to hint----’”
“Under pretext of studying literature, a desultory and unformed mind
would naturally return, like the dog of Scripture----”
“‘You’re a damned trencher-scrapin’, napkin-carryin’, shillin’-seekin’,
up-an-down-stairs &c.’” Howell breathed.
Beetle choked aloud on the sudden knowledge that King was the ancient
and eternal Chucks--later Count Shucksen--of _Peter Simple_. He had not
realised it before.
“Sorry, sir. I’m afraid I’ve been asleep, sir,” he sputtered.
The shout of the Army Class diverted the storm. King was grimly glad
that Beetle had condescended to honour truth so far. Perhaps he
would now lend his awakened ear to a summary of the externals of Dr.
Johnson, as limned by Macaulay. And he read, with intention, the just
historian’s outline of a grotesque figure with untied shoe-strings,
that twitched and grunted, gorged its food, bit its finger-nails, and
neglected its ablutions. The Form hailed it as a speaking likeness of
Beetle; nor were they corrected.
Then King implored him to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact
connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to
what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.
Beetle was understood to say that the only thing he could remember was
in French.
“You add, then, the Gallic tongue to your accomplishments? The
information plus the accent? ’Tis well! Admirable Crichton, proceed!”
And Beetle proceeded with the text of an old Du Maurier drawing in a
back-number of _Punch_:
“De tous ces défunts cockolores
Le moral Fénelon,
Michel Ange et Johnson
(Le Docteur) sont les plus awful bores.”
To which Howell, wooingly, just above his breath:
“‘Oh, _won’t_ you come up, come up?’”
Result, as the tea-bell rang, one hundred lines, to be shown up at
seven-forty-five that evening. This was meant to blast the pleasant
summer interval between tea and prep. Howell, a favourite in “English”
as well as Latin, got off; but the Army Class crashed in to tea with a
new Limerick.
* * * * *
The imposition was a matter of book-keeping, as far as Beetle was
concerned; for it was his custom of rainy afternoons to fabricate
store of lines in anticipation of just these accidents. They covered
such English verse as interested him at the moment, and helped to fix
the stuff in his memory. After tea, he drew the required amount from
his drawer in Number Five Study, thrust it into his pocket, went up
to the Head’s house, and settled himself in the big Outer Library
where, ever since the Head had taken him off all mathematics, he
did précis-work and French translation. Here he buried himself in a
close-printed, thickish volume which had been his chosen browse for
some time. A hideous account of a hanging, drawing, and quartering
had first attracted him to it; but later he discovered the book
(_Curiosities of Literature_ was its name) full of the finest confused
feeding--such as forgeries and hoaxes, Italian literary societies,
religious and scholastic controversies of old when men (even that most
dreary John Milton, of _Lycidas_) slanged each other, not without
dust and heat, in scandalous pamphlets; personal peculiarities of the
great; and a hundred other fascinating inutilities. This evening he
fell on a description of wandering, mad Elizabethan beggars, known as
Tom-a-Bedlams, with incidental references to Edgar who plays at being a
Tom-a-Bedlam in _Lear_, but whom Beetle did not consider at all funny.
Then, at the foot of a left-hand page, leaped out on him a verse--of
incommunicable splendour, opening doors into inexplicable worlds--from
a song which Tom-a-Bedlams were supposed to sing. It ran:
With a heart of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
With a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney,
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end--
Methinks it is no journey.
He sat, mouthing and staring before him, till the prep-bell rang and it
was time to take his lines up to King’s study and lay them, as hot from
the press, in the impot-basket appointed. He carried his dreams on to
Number Five. They knew the symptoms of old.
“Readin’ again,” said Stalky, like a wife welcoming her spouse from the
pot-house.
“Look here, I’ve found out something----” Beetle began. “Listen----”
“No, you don’t--till afterwards. It’s Turkey’s prep.” This meant it
was a Horace Ode through which Turkey would take them for a literal
translation, and all possible pitfalls. Stalky gave his businesslike
attention, but Beetle’s eye was glazed and his mind adrift throughout,
and he asked for things to be repeated. So, when Turkey closed the
Horace, justice began to be executed.
“I’m all right,” he protested. “I swear I heard a lot what Turkey said.
Shut up! Oh, shut _up_! Do shut up, you putrid asses.” Beetle was
speaking from the fender, his head between Turkey’s knees, and Stalky
largely over the rest of him.
“What’s the metre of the beastly thing?” McTurk waved his Horace. “Look
it up, Stalky. Twelfth of the Third.”
“_Ionicum a minore_,” Stalky reported, closing his book in turn. “Don’t
let him forget it”; and Turkey’s Horace marked the metre on Beetle’s
skull, with special attention to elisions. It hurt.
“Miserar’ est neq’ amori dare ludum neque dulci
Mala vino laver’ aut ex----”
“Got it? You liar! You’ve no ear at all! Chorus, Stalky!”
Both Horaces strove to impart the measure, which was altogether
different from its accompaniment. Presently Howell dashed in from his
study below.
“Look _out_! If you make this infernal din we’ll have some one up the
staircase in a sec.”
“We’re teachin’ Beetle Horace. He was goin’ to burble us some muck he’d
read,” the tutors explained.
“’Twasn’t muck! It was about those Tom-a-Bedlams in _Lear_.”
“Oh!” said Stalky. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“’Cause you didn’t listen. They had drinkin’-horns an’ badges, and
there’s a Johnson note on Shakespeare about the meanin’ of Edgar sayin’
‘My horn’s dry.’ But Johnson’s dead-wrong about it. Aubrey says----”
“Who’s Aubrey?” Howell demanded. “Does King know about him?”
“Dunno. Oh yes, an’ Johnson started to learn Dutch when he was seventy.”
“What the deuce for?” Stalky asked.
“For a change after his Dikker, I suppose,” Howell suggested.
“And I looked up a lot of other English stuff, too. I’m goin’ to try it
all on King.”
“Showin’-off as usual,” said the acid McTurk, who, like his race, lived
and loved to destroy illusions.
“No. For a draw. He’s an unjust dog! If you read, he says you’re
showin’-off. If you don’t, you’re a mark-huntin’ Philistine. What does
he want you to do, curse him?”
“Shut up, Beetle!” Stalky pronounced. “There’s more than draws in this.
You’ve cribbed your maths off me ever since you came to Coll. You don’t
know what a co-sine is, even _now_. Turkey does all your Latin.”
“I like that! Who does both your _Picciolas_?”
“French don’t count. It’s time you began to work for your giddy livin’
an’ help us. _You_ aren’t goin’ up for anythin’ that matters. Play for
your side, as Heffles says, or die the death! You don’t want to die
the death, again, do you? Now, let’s hear about that stinkard Johnson
swottin’ Dutch. You’re sure it was Sammivel, not Binjamin? You _are_ so
dam’ inaccurate!”
Beetle conducted an attentive class on the curiosities of literature
for nearly a quarter of an hour. As Stalky pointed out, he promised to
be useful.
* * * * *
The Horace Ode next morning ran well; and King was content. Then, in
full feather, he sailed round the firmament at large, and, somehow,
apropos to something or other, used the word “della Cruscan”--“if any
of you have the faintest idea of its origin.” Some one hadn’t caught it
correctly; which gave Beetle just time to whisper “Bran--an’ mills,” to
Howell, who said promptly: “Hasn’t it somethin’ to do with mills--an’
bran, sir?” King cast himself into poses of stricken wonder. “Oddly
enough,” said he, “it has.”
They were then told a great deal about some silly Italian Academy
of Letters which borrowed its office furniture from the equipment
of mediæval flour-mills. And: “How has our Ap-Howell come by his
knowledge?” Howell, being, indeed, Welsh, thought that it might have
been something he had read in the holidays. King openly purred over him.
“If that had been _me_,” Beetle observed while they were toying with
sardines between lessons, “he’d ha’ dropped on me for showin’-off.”
“See what we’re savin’ you from,” Stalky answered. “I’m playin’
Johnson, ’member, this afternoon.”
That, too, came cleanly off the bat; and King was gratified by this
interest in the Doctor’s studies. But Stalky hadn’t a ghost of a notion
how he had come by the fact.
“Why didn’t you say your father told you?” Beetle asked at tea.
“My-y Lord! Have you ever seen the guv’nor?” Stalky collapsed shrieking
among the piles of bread and butter. “Well, look here. Taffy goes in
to-morrow about those drinkin’ horns an’ Tom-a-Bedlams. You cut up to
the library after tea, Beetle. You know what King’s English papers are
like. Look out useful stuff for answers an’ we’ll divvy at prep.”
At prep, then, Beetle, loaded with assorted curiosities, made
his forecast. He argued that there were bound to be a good many
“what-do-you-know-abouts” those infernal Augustans. Pope was generally
a separate item; but the odds were that Swift, Addison, Steele,
Johnson, and Goldsmith would be lumped under one head. Dryden was
possible, too, though rather outside the Epoch.
“Dryden. Oh! ‘Glorious John!’ ’Know _that_ much, anyhow,” Stalky
vaunted.
“Then lug in Claude Halcro in the _Pirate_,” Beetle advised. “He’s
always sayin’ ‘Glorious John.’ King’s a hog on Scott, too.”
“No-o. I don’t read Scott. You take this Hell Crow chap, Taffy.”
“Right. What about Addison, Beetle?” Howell asked.
“’Drank like a giddy fish.”
“We all know that,” chorused the gentle children.
“He said, ‘See how a Christian can die’; an’ he hadn’t any
conversation, ’cause some one or other----”
“Guessin’ again, _as_ usual,” McTurk sneered. “Who?”
“’Cynical man called Mandeville--said he was a silent parson in a
tie-wig.”
“Right-ho! I’ll take the silent parson with wig and ’purtenances. Taffy
can have the dyin’ Christian,” Stalky decided.
Howell nodded, and resumed: “What about Swift, Beetle?”
“’Died mad. Two girls. Saw a tree, an’ said: ‘I shall die at the top.’
Oh yes, an’ his private amusements were ‘ridiculous an’ trivial.’”
Howell shook a wary head. “Dunno what that might let me in for with
King. You can have it, Stalky.”
“I’ll take that,” McTurk yawned. “King doesn’t matter a curse to me,
an’ he knows it. ‘Private amusements contemptible.’” He breathed all
Ireland into the last perverted word.
“Right,” Howell assented. “Bags I the dyin’ tree, then.”
“’Cheery lot, these Augustans,” Stalky sighed. “’Any more of ’em been
croakin’ lately, Beetle?”
“My Hat!” the far-seeing Howell struck in. “King always gives us a
stinker half-way down. What about Richardson--that ‘Clarissa’ chap,
y’know?”
“I’ve found out lots about him,” said Beetle, promptly.
“He was the ‘Shakespeare of novelists.’”
“King won’t stand that. He says there’s only one Shakespeare. ’Mustn’t
rot about Shakespeare to King,” Howell objected.
“An’ he was ‘always delighted with his own works,’” Beetle continued.
“Like you,” Stalky pointed out.
“Shut up. Oh yes, an’----” he consulted some hieroglyphics on a scrap
of paper--“the--the impassioned Diderot (dunno who _he_ was) broke
forth: ‘O Richardson, thou singular genius!’”
Howell and Stalky rose together, each clamouring that he had bagged
that first.
“I _must_ have it!” Howell shouted. “King’s never seen me breakin’
forth with the impassioned Diderot. He’s _got_ to! Give me Diderot, you
impassioned hound!”
“Don’t upset the table. There’s tons more. An’ his genius was ‘fertile
and prodigal.’”
“All right! _I_ don’t mind bein’ ‘fertile and prodigal’ for a change,”
Stalky volunteered. “King’s going to enjoy this exam. If he was the
Army Prelim. chap we’d score.”
“The Prelim. questions will be pretty much like King’s stuff,” Beetle
assured them.
“But it’s always a score to know what your examiner’s keen on,” Howell
said, and illustrated it with an anecdote. “’Uncle of mine stayin’ with
my people last holidays----”
“Your Uncle Diderot?” Stalky asked.
“No, you ass! Captain of Engineers. He told me he was up for a Staff
exam. to an old Colonel-bird who believed that the English were the
lost Tribes of Israel, or something like that. He’d written tons o’
books about it.”
“All Sappers are mad,” said Stalky. “That’s one of the things the
guv’nor _did_ tell me.”
“Well, ne’er mind. My uncle played up, o’ course. ’Said he’d
always believed it, too. And _so_ he got nearly top-marks for
field-fortification. ’Didn’t know a thing about it, either, he said.”
“Good biznai!” said Stalky. “Well, go on, Beetle. What about Steele?”
“Can’t I keep anything for myself?”
“Not _much_! King’ll ask you where you got it from, and you’d show off,
an’ he’d find out. This ain’t your silly English Literature, you ass.
It’s our marks. Can’t you see that?”
Beetle very soon saw it was exactly as Stalky had said.
* * * * *
Some days later a happy, and therefore not too likeable, King was
explaining to the Reverend John in his own study how effort, zeal,
scholarship, the humanities, and perhaps a little natural genius for
teaching, could inspire even the mark-hunting minds of the young. His
text was the result of his General Knowledge paper on the Augustans and
_King Lear_.
“Howell,” he said, “I was not surprised at. He _has_ intelligence. But,
frankly, I did not expect young Corkran to burgeon. Almost one might
believe he occasionally read a book.”
“And McTurk too?”
“Yes. He had somehow arrived at a rather just estimate of Swift’s
lighter literary diversions. They _are_ contemptible. And in the ‘Lear’
questions--they were all attracted by Edgar’s character--Stalky had dug
up something about Aubrey on Tom-a-Bedlams from some unknown source.
Aubrey, of all people! I’m sure I only alluded to him once or twice.”
“Stalky among the prophets of ‘English’! And he didn’t remember where
he’d got it either?”
“No. Boys are amazingly purblind and limited. But if they keep this
up at the Army Prelim., it is conceivable the Class may not do itself
discredit. I told them so.”
“I congratulate you. Ours is the hardest calling in the world, with the
least reward. By the way, who are they likely to send down to examine
us?”
“It rests between two, I fancy. Martlett--with me at Balliol--and
Hume. _They_ wisely chose the Civil Service. Martlett has published
a brochure on Minor Elizabethan Verse--journeyman work, of
course--enthusiasms, but no grounding. Hume I heard of lately as having
infected himself in Germany with some Transatlantic abominations about
Shakespeare and Bacon. He was Sutton.” (The Head, by the way, was a
Sutton man.)
King returned to his examination-papers and read extracts from them, as
mothers repeat the clever sayings of their babes.
“Here’s old Taffy Howell, for instance--apropos to Diderot’s eulogy of
Richardson. ‘The impassioned Diderot broke forth: “Richardson, thou
singular genius!”’”
It was the Reverend John who stopped himself, just in time, from
breaking forth. He recalled that, some days ago, he had heard Stalky on
the stairs of Number Five, hurling the boots of many fags at Howell’s
door and bidding the “impassioned Diderot” within “break forth” at his
peril.
“Odd,” said he, gravely, when his pipe drew again. “Where did Diderot
say that?”
“I’ve forgotten for the moment. Taffy told me he’d picked it up in the
course of holiday reading.”
“Possibly. One never knows what heifers the young are ploughing with.
Oh! How did Beetle do?”
“The necessary dates and his handwriting defeated him, I’m glad to
say. I cannot accuse myself of having missed any opportunity to
castigate that boy’s inordinate and intolerable conceit. But I’m afraid
it’s hopeless. I think I touched him somewhat, though, when I read
Macaulay’s stock piece on Johnson. The others saw it at once.”
“Yes, you told me about that at the time,” said the Reverend John,
hurriedly.
“And our esteemed Head having taken him off maths for this
précis-writing--whatever that means!--has turned him into a most
objectionable free-lance. He was without any sense of reverence before,
and promiscuous cheap fiction--which is all that his type of reading
means--aggravates his worst points. When it came to a trial he was
simply nowhere.”
“Ah, well! Ours is a hard calling--specially if one’s sensitive.
Luckily, I’m too fat.” The Reverend John went out to bathe off the
Pebble Ridge, girt with a fair linen towel whose red fringe signalled
from half a mile away.
* * * * *
There lurked on summer afternoons, round the fives-court or the gym,
certain watchful outcasts who had exhausted their weekly ration of
three baths, and who were too well known to Cory the bathman to outface
him by swearing that they hadn’t. These came in like sycophantic pups
at walk, and when the Reverend John climbed the Pebble Ridge, more than
a dozen of them were at his heels, with never a towel among them. One
could only bathe off the Ridge with a House Master, but by custom, a
dozen details above a certain age, no matter whence recruited, made
a “House” for bathing, if any kindly Master chose so to regard them.
Beetle led the low, growing reminder: “House! House, sir? We’ve got a
House now, Padre.”
“Let it be law as it is desired,” boomed the Reverend John. On which
word they broke forward, hirpling over the unstable pebbles and
stripping as they ran, till, when they touched the sands, they were as
naked as God had made them, and as happy as He intended them to be.
It was half-flood--dead-smooth, except for the triple line of combers,
a mile from wing to wing, that broke evenly with a sound of ripping
canvas, while their sleek rear-guards formed up behind. One swam forth,
trying to copy the roll, rise, and dig-out of the Reverend John’s
side-stroke, and manœuvred to meet them so that they should crash on
one’s head, when for an instant one glanced down arched perspectives
of beryl, before all broke in fizzy, electric diamonds and the pulse
of the main surge slung one towards the beach. From a good comber’s
crest one was hove up almost to see Lundy on the horizon. In its long
cream-streaked trough, when the top had turned over and gone on, one
might be alone in mid-Atlantic. Either way it was divine. Then one
capered on the sands till one dried off; retrieved scattered flannels,
gave thanks in chorus to the Reverend John, and lazily trailed up to
five-o’clock call-over, taken on the lower cricket field.
“Eight this week,” said Beetle, and thanked Heaven aloud.
“Bathing seems to have sapped your mind,” the Reverend John remarked.
“Why did you do so vilely with the Augustans?”
“They _are_ vile, Padre. So’s _Lear_.”
“The other two did all right, though.”
“I expect they’ve been swottin’,” Beetle grinned.
“I’ve expected that, too, in my time. But I want to hear about the
‘impassioned Diderot,’ please.”
“Oh, that was Howell, Padre. You mean when Diderot broke forth:
‘Richardson, thou singular genius’? He’d read it in the holidays
somewhere.”
“I _beg_ your pardon. Naturally, Taffy would read Diderot in the
holidays. Well, I’m sorry I can’t lick you for this; but if any one
ever finds out anything about it, you’ve only yourself to thank.”
Beetle went up to College and to the Outer Library, where he had
on tap the last of a book called _Elsie Venner_, by a man called
Oliver Wendell Holmes--all about a girl who was interestingly allied
to rattlesnakes. He finished what was left of her, and cast about
for more from the same hand, which he found on the same shelf, with
the trifling difference that the writer’s Christian name was now
Nathaniel, and he did not deal in snakes. The authorship of Shakespeare
was his theme--not that Shakespeare with whom King oppressed the
Army Class, but a low-born, poaching, ignorant, immoral village
lout who could not have written one line of any play ascribed to
him. (Beetle wondered what King would say to Nathaniel if ever they
met.) The real author was Francis Bacon, of Bacon’s Essays, which
did not strike Beetle as any improvement. He had “done” the essays
last term. But evidently Nathaniel’s views annoyed people, for the
margins of his book--it was second-hand, and the old label of a public
library still adhered--flamed with ribald, abusive, and contemptuous
comments by various hands. They ranged from “Rot!” “Rubbish!” and
such like to crisp counter-arguments. And several times some one
had written: “This beats Delia.” One copious annotator dissented,
saying: “Delia is supreme in this line,” “Delia beats this hollow.”
“See Delia’s Philosophy, page so and so.” Beetle grieved he could
not find anything about Delia (he had often heard King’s views on
lady-writers as a class) beyond a statement by Nathaniel, with
pencilled exclamation-points rocketting all round it that “Delia
Bacon discovered in Francis Bacon a good deal more than Macaulay.”
Taking it by and large, with the kind help of the marginal notes, it
appeared that Delia and Nathaniel between them had perpetrated every
conceivable outrage against the Head-God of King’s idolatry: and King
was particular about his idols. Without pronouncing on the merits
of the controversy, it occurred to Beetle that a well-mixed dose of
Nathaniel ought to work on King like a seidlitz powder. At this point
a pencil and a half sheet of impot-paper came into action, and he went
down to tea so swelled with Baconian heresies and blasphemies that he
could only stutter between mouthfuls. He returned to his labours after
the meal, and was visibly worse at prep.
“I say,” he began, “have you ever heard that Shakespeare never wrote
his own beastly plays?”
“’Fat lot of good to us!” said Stalky. “We’ve got to swot ’em up just
the same. Look here! This is for English parsin’ to-morrow. It’s _your_
biznai.” He read swiftly from the school _Lear_ (Act II., Sc. 2) thus:
Steward:
“Never any:
It pleased the King his master, very late,
To strike at me, upon his misconstruction;
When he, conjunct, an’ flatterin’ his displeasure,
Tripped me behind: bein’ down, insulted, railed,
And put upon him such a deal of man,
That worthy’d him, got praises of the King
For him attemptin’ who was self-subdued;
And, in the fleshment of this dread exploit,
Drew me on here.”
“Now then, my impassioned bard, _construez_! That’s Shakespeare.”
“’Give it up! He’s drunk,” Beetle declared at the end of a blank half
minute.
“No, he isn’t,” said Turkey. “He’s a steward--on the estate--chattin’
to his employers.”
“Well--look here, Turkey. You ask King if Shakespeare ever wrote his
own plays, an’ he won’t give a dam’ what the steward said.”
“I’ve not come here to play with ushers,” was McTurk’s view of the case.
“I’d do it,” Beetle protested, “only he’d slay _me_! He don’t love me
when I ask about things. I can give you the stuff to draw him--tons
of it!” He broke forth into a précis, interspersed with praises, of
Nathaniel Holmes and his commentators--especially the latter. He also
mentioned Delia, with sorrow that he had not read her. He spoke through
nearly the whole of prep; and the upshot of it was that McTurk relented
and promised to approach King next “English” on the authenticity of
Shakespeare’s plays.
* * * * *
The time and tone chosen were admirable. While King was warming himself
by a preliminary canter round the Form’s literary deficiencies, Turkey
coughed in a style which suggested a reminder to a slack _employé_
that it was time to stop chattering and get to work. As King began to
bristle, Turkey inquired: “I’d be glad to know, sir, if it’s true that
Shakespeare did not write his own plays at all?”
“Good God!” said King most distinctly. Turkey coughed again piously.
“They all say so in Ireland, sir.”
“Ireland--Ireland--Ireland!” King overran Ireland with one blast of
flame that should have been written in letters of brass for instruction
to-day. At the end, Turkey coughed once more, and the cough said: “It
is Shakespeare, and not my country, that you are hired to interpret to
me.” He put it directly, too: “An’ is it true at all about the alleged
plays, sir?”
“It is not,” Mr. King whispered, and began to explain, on lines that
might, perhaps, have been too freely expressed for the parents of those
young (though it gave their offspring delight), but with a passion,
force, and wealth of imagery which would have crowned his discourse at
any university. By the time he drew towards his peroration the Form was
almost openly applauding. Howell noiselessly drummed the cadence of
“Bonnie Dundee” on his desk; Paddy Vernon framed a dumb: “Played! Oh,
_well_ played, sir!” at intervals; Stalky kept tally of the brighter
gems of invective; and Beetle sat aghast but exulting among the spirits
he had called up. For though their works had never been mentioned,
and though Mr. King said he had merely glanced at the obscene
publications, he seemed to know a tremendous amount about Nathaniel and
Delia--especially Delia.
“I told you so!” said Beetle, proudly, at the end.
“What? _Him!_ I wasn’t botherin’ myself to listen to him an’ his
Delia,” McTurk replied.
Afterwards King fought his battle over again with the Reverend John in
the Common Room.
“Had I been that triple ass Hume, I might have risen to the bait. As it
is, I flatter myself I left them under no delusions as to Shakespeare’s
authenticity. Yes, a small drink, please. Virtue has gone out of me
indeed. But _where_ did they get it from?”
“The devil! The young devil,” the Reverend John muttered, half aloud.
“I could have excused devilry. It was ignorance. Sheer, crass, insolent
provincial ignorance! I tell you, Gillett, if the Romans had dealt
faithfully with the Celt, _ab initio_, this--this would never have
happened.”
“Quite so. I should like to have heard your remarks.”
“I’ve told ’em to tell me what they remember of them, with their own
conclusions, in essay form next week.”
Since he had loosed the whirlwind, the fair-minded Beetle offered to
do Turkey’s essay for him. On Turkey’s behalf, then, he dealt with
Shakespeare’s lack of education, his butchering, poaching, drinking,
horse-holding, and errand-running as Nathaniel had described them;
lifted from the same source pleasant names, such as “rustic” and “sorry
poetaster,” on which last special hopes were built; and expressed
surprise that one so ignorant could have done “what he was attributed
to.” His own essay contained no novelties. Indeed, he withheld one or
two promising “subsequently transpireds” for fear of distracting King.
* * * * *
But, when the essays were read, Mr. King confined himself wholly to
Turkey’s pitiful, puerile, jejune, exploded, unbaked, half-bottomed
thesis. He touched, too, on the “lie in the soul,” which was,
fundamentally, vulgarity--the negation of Reverence and the Decencies.
He broke forth into an impassioned defence of “mere atheism,” which he
said was often no more than mental flatulence--transitory and curable
by knowledge of life--in no way comparable, for essential enormity,
with the debasing pagan abominations to which Turkey had delivered
himself. He ended with a shocking story about one Jowett, who seemed to
have held some post of authority where King came from, and who had told
an atheistical undergraduate that if he could not believe in a Personal
God by five that afternoon he would be expelled--as, with tears of rage
in his eyes, King regretted that he could not expel McTurk. And Turkey
blew his nose in the middle of it.
But the aim of education being to develop individual judgment, King
could not well kill him for his honest doubts about Shakespeare. And
he himself had several times quoted, in respect to other poets: “There
lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.”
So he treated Turkey in Form like a coiled puff-adder; and there was a
tense peace among the Augustans. The only ripple was the day before the
Army Examiner came, when Beetle inquired if he “need take this exam.,
sir, as I’m not goin’ up for anything.” Mr. King said there was great
need--for many reasons, none of them flattering to vanity.
As far as the Army Class could judge, the Examiner was not worse than
his breed, and the written “English” paper ran closely on the lines of
King’s mid-term General Knowledge test. Howell played his “impassioned
Diderot” to the Richardson lead; Stalky his parson in the wig; McTurk
his contemptible Swift; Beetle, Steele’s affectionate notes out of
the spunging-house to “Dearest Prue,” all in due order. There were,
however, one or two leading questions about Shakespeare. A boy’s hand
shot up from a back bench.
“In answering Number Seven--reasons for Shakespeare’s dramatic
supremacy”--he said, “are we to take it Shakespeare _did_ write the
plays he is supposed to have written, sir?”
The Examiner hesitated an instant. “It is generally assumed that he
did.” But there was no reproof in his words. Beetle began to sit down
slowly.
Another hand and another voice: “Have we got to say we believe he did,
sir? Even if we do not?”
“You are not called upon to state your beliefs. But we can go into that
at _viva voce_ this afternoon--if it interests you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“What did you do that for?” Paddy Vernon demanded at dinner.
“It’s the lost tribes of Israel game, you ass,” said Howell.
“To make sure,” Stalky amplified. “If he was like King, he’d have shut
up Beetle an’ Turkey at the start, but he’d have thought King gave us
the Bacon notion. Well, he didn’t shut ’em up; so they’re playin’ it
again this afternoon. If he stands it then, he’ll be sure King gave us
the notion. Either way, it’s dead-safe for us--_an’_ King.”
At the afternoon’s _viva voce_, before they sat down to the Augustans,
the Examiner wished to hear, “with no bearing on the examination, of
course,” from those two candidates who had asked him about Question
Seven. Which were they?
“Take off your gigs, you owl,” said Stalky between his teeth. Beetle
pocketed them and looked into blurred vacancy with a voice coming out
of it that asked: “Who--what gave you that idea about Shakespeare?”
From Stalky’s kick he knew the question was for him.
“Some people say, sir, there’s a good deal of doubt about it nowadays,
sir.”
“Ye-es, that’s true, but----”
“It’s his knowin’ so much about legal phrases,” Turkey was in
support--a lone gun barking somewhere to his right.
“That is a crux, I admit. Of course, whatever one may think privately,
officially Shakespeare _is_ Shakespeare. But how have _you_ been taught
to look at the question?”
“Well, Holmes says it’s impossible he could----”
“On the legal phraseology alone, sir,” McTurk chimed in.
“Ah, but the theory is that Shakespeare’s experiences in the society of
that day brought him in contact with all the leading intellects.” The
Examiner’s voice was quite colloquial now.
“But they didn’t think much of actors then, sir, did they?” This was
Howell cooing like a cushat dove. “I mean----”
The Examiner explained the status of the Elizabethan actor in some
detail, ending: “And that makes it the more curious, doesn’t it?”
“And this Shakespeare was supposed to be writin’ plays and actin’ in
’em _all_ the time?” McTurk asked, with sinister meaning.
“Exactly what I--what lots of people have pointed out. Where did he get
the time to acquire all his special knowledge?”
“Then it looks as if there was something in it, doesn’t it, sir?”
“That,” said the Examiner, squaring his elbows at ease on the desk, “is
a very large question which----”
“Yes, sir!”--in half-a-dozen eagerly attentive keys....
For decency’s sake a few Augustan questions were crammed in
conscience-strickenly, about the last ten minutes. Howell took them
since they involved dates, but the answers, though highly marked,
were scarcely heeded. When the clock showed six-thirty the Examiner
addressed them as “Gentlemen”; and said he would have particular
pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a
genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected
the greatest credit on their instructors. He passed out: the Form
upstanding, as custom was.
“He’s goin’ to congratulate King,” said Howell. “Don’t make a row!
‘Don’t--make--a--noise--Or else you’ll wake the Baby!’”...
* * * * *
Mr. King of Balliol, after Mr. Hume of Sutton had complimented him, as
was only just, before all his colleagues in Common Room, was kindly
taken by the Reverend John to his study, where he exploded on the
hearth-rug.
“He--he thought _I_ had loosed this--this rancid Baconian rot among
them. He complimented me on my breadth of mind--my being abreast of the
times! You heard him? That’s how they think at Sutton. It’s an open
stye! A lair of bestial! They have a chapel there, Gillett, and they
pray for their souls--their _souls_!”
“His particular weakness apart, Hume was perfectly sincere about what
you’d done for the Army Class. He’ll report in that sense, too. That’s
a feather in your cap, and a deserved one. He said their interest in
Literature was unusual. That is _all_ your work, King.”
“But I bowed down in the House of Rimmon while he Baconised all over
me!--poor devil of an usher that I am! You heard it! I ought to have
spat in his eye! Heaven knows I’m as conscious of my own infirmities
as my worst enemy can be; but what have I done to deserve this? What
_have_ I done?”
“That’s just what I was wondering,” the Reverend John replied. “Have
you, perchance, done anything?”
“Where? How?”
“In the Army Class, for example.”
“Assuredly not! My Army Class? I couldn’t wish for a better--keen,
interested enough to read outside their allotted task--intelligent,
receptive! They’re head and shoulders above last year’s. The idea that
I, forsooth, should, even by inference, have perverted their minds with
this imbecile and unspeakable girls’-school tripe that Hume professes!
_You_ at least know that I have my standards; and in Literature and in
the Classics, I hold _maxima debetur pueris reverentia_.”[4]
“It’s singular, not plural, isn’t it?” said the Reverend John. “But
you’re absolutely right as to the principle!... Ours is a deadly
calling, King--specially if one happens to be sensitive.”
[4] The greatest respect is due to young persons.