THE WIDENING HORIZONS
My father took me in person to Marlborough. I did not much relish that,
since I thought, with private school ideas still hanging about me, that
it would be a handicap to be known as the son of a man who wore black
cloth gaiters, an apron, and a hat with strings at the side. That was
all very well in Cornwall, where he was bishop, but here I should have
preferred a parent who looked like other parents. He seemed to have no
consciousness of being unusually dressed himself, and one incident in
the few hours he stayed much impressed itself on me, for he came with me
into some class-room or other where a lot of boys were sitting, talking
and whistling, with their caps on. My father took off his hat when he
entered (which again I thought showed a slight want of knowledge), and
then, to my surprise, every boy in the place did the same. The whistling
ceased, nobody laughed, and I went out again rather proud of him. He
seemed to have done the right thing....
Outside the College buildings there were two or three small
boarding-houses and three large ones containing forty to fifty boys
each, into one of which I should have gone if I had got the famous
“House Scholarship.” As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick
building of three stories, each of which constituted an in-college
house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary: a big open space
from the skylight to the basement occupied the centre of it, with two
class-rooms and a boot-room in the basement. Round this open space ran
three floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these
passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, and
defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these three tiers of
passages opened four dormitories on each floor, a class-room, one
bathroom with three baths, a sitting and bedroom belonging to the
house-master of each house, with corresponding accommodation for a
second house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to the
bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen boys slept in each of
these dormitories, which were lit by day from three or four small
windows, and for purposes of going to bed and getting up in the dark
from one small gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a board
punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and furnished with a
corresponding number of crockery mugs to hold water for tooth-washing. A
narrow shelf ran round the room above the beds, where brushes and combs
were kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas-jet belonging
to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had a chair by his bedside where
he could put his clothes. As half the beds were directly below the
windows, the occupants naturally objected to having their immediate
windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy nights they were
all shut. There were no partitions between the beds; all operations were
conducted in wholesome publicity, and there was no objection to anybody
saying his prayers. Each dormitory was known by a letter of the
alphabet; the houses were called B 1, B 2, B 3, and every boy had his
school number. Thus my dry description was Benson, E. F., 234, B 1, L.
The day was a strenuous one. A clanging bell perambulating the passages
murdered sleep at half-past six, and there was chapel at seven. If you
chose to get up at half-past six, you had time for a cup of water-cocoa
on the ground floor and for a bath. Usually you got up on the first
sound of chapel-bell at 6:50, and, cocoa-less and with bootlaces flying,
sped down the stairs and across the court to get within the gates
outside chapel before a single fateful stroke of the bell announced that
you were late. By the gate were stationed two masters who on the stroke
put their arms across the entrance and prevented further ingress. If
there were many boys outside at that critical moment they used to charge
the masters and get in somehow, bearing down all opposition, and it was
delightful on such occasions to be safely and legitimately inside and
see a sort of football scrimmage going on. Usually, however, there would
only be a few stragglers, who attempted no violence. Punishments for
being late varied: on the first occasion there was no penalty, but if
you persevered in tardiness, the penalties became unpleasantly heavy.
But if you were late, you could at least do up your bootlaces and get a
cup of cocoa.
There was a lesson from about a quarter-past seven on the conclusion of
chapel till a quarter-past eight. A wholly insufficient breakfast was
then provided, consisting of tea ready mixed out of a tin can, a
circular inch of butter, and bread; on certain mornings there was
porridge. If you wanted anything beyond this fare, you had to buy it
yourself at school-shop. But you took your private milk-jug in to
breakfast and were given, I suppose, about a quarter of a pint of milk,
which you kept for a purpose. During the morning there were two hours’
school and one hour’s preparation and an hour and a half leisure. There
was meat and pudding for dinner at half-past one, and thereafter the
total provender provided was another inch of butter, with tea and bread,
at six, and supper consisting of hard biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a
glass of beer after evening chapel, about 8.45. I had an allowance,
originally, of sixpence a week, which was soon increased to a shilling;
and, quite rightly, the whole of that used to be spent in getting things
to eat. These were consumed at that daily love-feast called “brewing,”
which was a joyful affair and merits its own paragraph.
“Brewing” was a social function; you brewed in your class-room with your
friend, for everybody had a friend of some kind, and nobody brewed
alone. This function took place at varying hours in the afternoon, as
dictated by the hours of school, and rendered unnecessary the scanty
affair called “tea” provided by the college commissariat. In fact, as a
rule, nobody went into college tea at all, so bloated was he with liquid
when poor, and with liquid mixed with cake when rich. Brewing had never
anything to do with beer, for in winter you brewed tea or coffee, and in
summer lemonade in large earthenware bowls, with straws or india-rubber
pipes to drink it from. The tea itself you certainly brought from home
(and when that was used up Beth would send me some more), sometimes you
had sugar, and sometimes you hadn’t, and the milk was provided, as
aforesaid, by the college commissariat, and thus the whole of your money
could be devoted to cake. And there we sat each fellow by his friend,
when football was over, with kettles interminably filled at the college
pump, and put to boil on public gas-stoves, jealously watched in turn by
you or your friend, and the fresh kettle-full of water was poured on the
tea-leaves, and the last crumb of cake was devoured, and the last drop
of milk was coaxed out of the jug, and you enjoyed the full fellowship
of not quite enough to eat, scrupulously divided, and the romance of
being fourteen or fifteen thickened and fructified. You quarrelled and
made it up, and indeed there was very little quarrelling, and you looked
round the class-room, and intrigued and wondered and loved, and spliced
a broken squash-racket, and uncurled the interminable folds of felt of a
burst fives-ball, down to the heart of cork that lay in the centre of
it, and made fresh plans. Then if you were very prudent you washed out
the teapot and the cups and saucers, and especially the milk-jug,
because if you didn’t, it stank appallingly next morning, and in the
morning you could not get any hot water. Cold water was of no use with a
milk-jug: it had to be rinsed with hot water, unless you wanted to find
dreadful curds when, next day, the fresh milk was poured into it.
Bloated with tea you went to chapel again, and didn’t want any beer or
cheese, and wished it was brewing-time again. Then there was an hour’s
preparation in the house class-room, and if you had not had a bath in
the morning very likely you had one at night, and the other boys drifted
into your dormitory where already you lay warm and sleepy in bed, and
perhaps the head of the house gave you a piece of hot buttered toast, as
he came in, for prefects had the privilege of taking bread and butter
away from hall, and you ate it sumptuously and wiped your greasy hands
on the bedclothes. If there was a boy with the gift of narrative in the
dormitory, he often told a story as soon as lights were put out (or
rather the one gas-jet) until he or his hearers got sleepy, and the
story faded into silence. A slippered footstep would be heard along the
passage, and the house-master, candle in hand, made his round of the
dormitories....
In each dormitory there was a big boy, not in sixth form, who was
captain of the dormitory, and a prefect in sixth form. On the character
of these and the two or three other big fellows depended the character
of their dormitory. Bullying, as far as I know, was non-existent; but in
all other respects, they had far more power for good or ill in their
hands than the whole staff of masters put together, for the house-master
went his rounds soon after lights were put out, and it was pretty
certain that he would not intrude again. Even if he should take it into
his head to come out of his rooms a second time, his approach could be
signalled by the boy who occupied the bed opposite the door, which was
always left open; he would be told to “keep cavé,” and stories or
bolster-fights or any other irregularity could safely be committed, for
the young Brangaene from the watch-tower of a bed would whisper, “cavé,”
and the white-robed had plenty of time to steal back to their nests from
wherever they might be and be plunged in profound sleep before the
master traversed the passage. Practically, then, there was no superior
supervision; the elder boys and prefects of dormitories moulded the
material committed to their charge as they chose, and certainly there
was no secret detective-work or encouragement of talebearers on the part
of the masters. The decency, the morality, the discipline that result
from such a system, where these virtues are the result of public
opinion, are of far more robust quality than if they are merely the
forced product of the fear of detection. With the hideous ingenuity that
is peculiarly characteristic of boys, it would have been perfectly easy
to have evaded detection, if the knowledge that there was secret
detective-work going on on the part of masters had challenged our wits
and roused us to invention for the sake alone of “scoring off” masters.
As it was, a well-behaved dormitory behaved well because it was “bad
form” to behave otherwise, while a dormitory naturally ill-behaved,
would have invented some system of sentries which would certainly have
defeated all surprise night-attacks on the part of masters, and not, as
Plato says, have “advanced one whit in virtue.” Boys are far more
ingenious than grown-up men, and the challenge on the part of the
authorities implied by creeping about at strange hours of the night in
slippers would certainly have been delightedly accepted. But there was
no such challenge and well-conducted dormitories, by far the majority,
grew, so to speak, on their own root, and were not grafted on to any
stem that fed them with the sap of authority.
Meantime, the fatal foundation-scholarship examination, to be held in
December, was approaching, and I awaited its advent with an unruffled
consciousness of another failure imminent. To prepare for it, I had
certain private tuition out of school hours, and by a much more
oppressive piece of legislation, I was not allowed to have anything to
do with music except in so far as it was musical to contribute a
muscular treble to the choir in chapel. That deprivation I still
deplore, for I had at that time an odd and quite untrained faculty for
visualizing, by some interior process, tunes that I heard, and being
able to “see” them, so to speak, without any direct exercise of will.
Thus, a term or two later, when an accompanist failed, I took his place
at some sing-song, and transposed at sight Handel’s “Where’er you walk,”
which I did not previously know, from the key of B flat into G, without
any sense of effort, thanks to this little “kink” of internal
visualization. Whatever that kink was, it was not the result of
training, but, I suppose, some small natural aptitude towards the
science of sound which now I dearly wish that I had been allowed to
water and cultivate without break. It must have been a feeble and
under-vitalized growth, for when I was at liberty again to waste as much
time as I chose at the piano, it was certainly less vigorous than it had
been, and never afterwards recovered, when I could stray and strum as I
pleased in melodious pastures. The soil in which it grew was there, for
all my life music has been to me as a celestial light, shining in dark
places for the mitigation of their blackness, and flooding the serene
and sunlit with its especial gold, but from that soil there withered a
little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated eggs was
despoiled, and the bird came not back. But I expect that the wisdom of
the edict was fully justified in the judgment of the prohibitionists,
when on one snowy morning in December the list of the winners of
foundation-scholarships was promulgated, and there was my name
incredibly among them at a decent altitude.
By one of Nature’s most admirable devices our memories always retain a
keener sense of such experiences as have been enjoyable, than those of
the drabber sort, and to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the
bran-pie that was not bright and alluring. There were friendships and
hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and black striped jersey, into
the muddy mysteries of Rugby football, and the dizzy heights (soaring
far above the sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing
in the lower team of the house. There was a school concert at the end of
that first term, and it gave me a complacent thrill to remember that I
was a foundation-scholar when the “Carmen” was sung. But it gave me a
sense of stupefied astonishment to hear the organist, Mr. Bambridge,
play as an encore to his piano-solo, his own original variations on the
theme of “Auld Lang Syne.” Never (except in the case of Miss Wirtz) was
there such a finger, and speaking purely from the impression then made,
I should be obliged to confess that for matter of pure brilliance of
execution and mastery of technique, Mr. Bambridge must have been a far
more accomplished performer than any pianist whom I have heard since.
Why did he not take London by storm with those amazing pyrotechnics of
his own invention, and throne himself higher than ever Paderewski or
Carreno or Busoni soared? I cannot even now bring myself to believe that
any of those lesser lights ever shone like Mr. Bambridge, when with
flying fingers and any quantity of the loud pedal he swooped up and down
in pearly runs and tremendous octaves, while all the time that powerful
thumb of his, relentless and regular as the stroke of a piston, beat out
simultaneously (there was the wonder of it) the original air. I wanted
the piano to comprise an extra octave or two that so he might have a
larger arena for his melodious magic. I wanted to have more ears, so
that they should all be glutted with the beautiful banging and netted in
the gossamer of Mr. Bambridge’s chromatic scales. Even Bach--but it is
always idle to make comparisons between the supreme: who judges between
the various peaks that face the dawn, or cares to plumb the sea, so long
as the sun glitters on its surface, and in the shadow of the rock there
glows the translucent blue of Tyre?...
Straight from that concert I made my honourable return to Truro, and
found that my spurs were won, and with a light heart played Pirates
again, and under the short reign of Byron’s supremacy (for we had been
learning “Childe Harold” by heart in the English repetition lesson)
deluged the chaste pages of the _Saturday Magazine_ with amorous
innocence. Soon, too, the butterfly collection began to assume the
virile toga, for though music was forbidden as a study, natural history,
as encouraged at Marlborough by the society known as the “Bug and
Beetle,” was a legitimate pursuit, and my father strongly approved of my
entering for the “Staunton Prize,” awarded to the best collection of
butterflies and moths, to be made that spring and summer, and to be
adjudged in the autumn. In the warm early-maturing spring of Cornwall,
the downs and lanes were lively with lepidoptera at Easter, and those
second holidays, passing in a whirl of butterfly nets and a corking and
uncorking of killing-bottles, were a sort of canonization of the
collections. Brimstones and garden whites, and holly blues and small
tortoiseshells took on a more serious aspect, and the pins that
eventually fixed them in cork-lined boxes were indeed as nails driven in
by masters of assemblies. The collection must be a strictly personal
one: I had to catch the victims myself, and kill and set them, but
Maggie, even more wildly enthusiastic than me, might, without a
violation of conscientious scruples, indicate a yellow-tip enjoying the
sunshine, or among nibbled leaves discover a geometer caterpillar
turning itself into a measuring-rod.
Cricket, therefore, on the return for the summer half took a subordinate
place, and obtaining “leave off” from it as a compulsory game, I spent
the long summer afternoons in the enchantment of Savernake Forest. Here
it was that the Staunton Collection began to lay more pregnant eggs in
a receptive soil, for I trace to those sunny hours the betrothal of my
soul to the goddess of trees and solitary places, to whose allegiance I
have ever been faithful. Net in hand, and bulging with nests of
chip-boxes I used to climb the steep down fringed with the secular
beeches that form the outer wall of that superb woodland, pausing
perhaps for a “blue” or a “small copper” on the way, but eager for entry
into the temple of trees. Here underneath those living towers, the earth
would be bare, but from the coverts where the sunlight fell only in
flakes and shower-drops of gold, you passed into open glades of bracken
and bramble, through which ran smooth grass-walks of short downland
turf. In these sunny lakes of forest-enfolded open, a few hawthorns
stood like snowy and sweet-smelling islands, and along the edges of the
grass-rides hovered the speckled fritillaries. Then came a group of
hazel trees to be beaten, with net spread beneath to catch the dropping
caterpillars, and grey-trunked oaks, whose bark was to be diligently
searched for slumbering dagger-moths, difficult to find owing to their
protective colouring. Red-spotted burnets clung to thistle-heads, green
hair-streaks (especially in Rabley Copse) must be put up from their
resting-places before they were visible, and there too marble whites
rustled their chequered wings in my net. Deeper and deeper into the
forest would I go, and though I had every conscious faculty alert for
pursuits and captures, yet all the time--and this is precisely why I
have lingered with such prolixity over the Staunton Prize--the
honey-bees of my subconscious self were swarming in with their
imperishable gleanings. Cell after cell they constructed within me, and
filled them with the essences that they culled from beech and fern and
all the presences that subtly haunted the great forest aisles. There
first did I hear the music of Pan’s flute with the inward ear, and with
the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and the dryads of the
woods; and if, as most surely I believe, my disembodied spirit shall
some day visit the places where I learned to love the beauty of this
peerless world, how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of
Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity of the forest,
and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken at the edge of the
grass-rides.
The Staunton Prize (with how much more derived from those excursions!)
fluttered pleasantly into my butterfly net, and with the flaming of the
autumn leaves, and the hibernation of my quarry, another interest, that
of athleticism, asserted its supremacy over its eager subject. Much has
been written by many wise men as to this robust autocracy in schools,
deploring its paramount sway, and suggesting nobler ideals than muscular
swiftness and accuracy of eye for youth’s pursuing, but what, when all
is said and done, can be proposed as a substitute while the nature of
the average boy remains what it is? Love of learning, intellectual
ambitions at that age are natural but to the few, and while we all
respect the youth who at the age of fifteen is really more attracted by
history or philosophy than by fives and football, who can believe that
there would be any great gain to the nation at large if every schoolboy
was like him? It is frankly unthinkable that the average boy should
choose as his heroes those members of the sixth form who have a
tremendous aptitude for Iambics, or applaud, with the fanatic enthusiasm
with which he hails a fine run down the football field, the intellectual
athlete who this morning showed up so stunning a piece of Ciceronian
prose. Full opportunity in school hours and in voluntary study is given
to the few who, from physical disability or mental precocity, actually
prefer intellectual pursuits to athletics, but the English
fifteen-year-old is naturally a Philistine, and Philistia had much
better be glad of him. For as a rule he is not a prig, and while he
cannot quite understand how anyone should prefer reading to playing
games, he does not despise the student, but generally refers to him with
a certain vague respect as being “jolly clever.” But if it was possible
to implant firmly in the soil of schools the intellectual banner, and to
succeed in making the whole body of boys rally enthusiastically round
it, it is difficult to repress a shudder at the thought of what that
school would be like. Germany, perhaps, alone among the modern nations
has succeeded in imbuing its youth with a passion for learning and
discipline, and it would appear, now that we have been able to
appreciate German mentality, that this triumphant achievement has been
won at an appalling cost; at the cost, that is, of precisely those
virtues which games, generally speaking, are productive of. And in the
long run, and on the large scale that type seems to come to a bad
maturity.
It is right then that for small boys games no less than work should be
compulsory, for if work produces the man of letters, the man of science,
the artist, the educated individual who can take his place in a
progressive nation, not less do games produce a certain general
hardihood, a sense of fair play, lacking which we should fare badly as a
nation. To most boys with growing limbs and swelling sinews, physical
activity is a natural instinct, and there is no need to drive them into
the football field or the fives court: they go there because they like
it, and there is no need to make games compulsory for them. But it is
for those who, whether from a lazy habit of body or from a precociously
active habit of mind, do not naturally gravitate to those pleasant
arenas, that this compulsion is necessary, and to make them, for the
sake of their health, go for a walk instead, does not produce at all the
desired effect. They can go for any number of pleasant walks when they
are fifty: at fifteen (given they have not got some corporal disability)
it is far better for them to run and to kick and to hit and to sweat.
Not their bodies alone partake in these benefits: their minds learn
control of all kinds; they must keep their tempers, they must remain
cool in hot corners (such as they will assuredly experience in their
offices in later life), they must maintain a certain suavity in the
midst of violence; and it is just this discipline here roughly summed up
that gives games their value. Presently, when the studious are a year or
two older, they will have attained to scholastic altitudes where
athletic compulsion is no longer put upon them, and then they can please
themselves. By that time, too, the normal young Philistine will have
awoke to the importance of other things than games, and, unless he is a
sheer impenetrable dunce, have come to regard the studious with far more
sincere respect. But for both, this year or two of compulsion is wholly
beneficial. As for the supposed inflexibility of this athletic
autocracy, it is founded on a complete misapprehension: it should with
far more accuracy be described as a democracy, for its heroes and
legislators are undoubtedly elected by the people, and until the nature
of boys is subjected to some radical operation, so long will they
continue (though with infinite indulgence for the “jolly clever”) to
make heroes after their own hearts.
That which above all gilded and glorified these delights, that which was
the stem from which their green leaves drew nourishment, was friendship.
All these were the foliage that was fed from that stem, though the sun
and the clear windy air and the rain fortified and refreshed them and
swelled the buds that expanded into flowers. For what man is there,
surrounded though he be with the love of wife and children, who does not
retain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each other? Having
felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten it, and if he never felt it he
missed one of the most golden of the prizes of youth, unrecapturable in
mature life. In many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male or
female: though they take on much of what they are and of what they
learn, strengthened and expanded, into manhood, they leave behind, given
that they grow into normal and healthy beings, a certain emotional
affection towards the coevals of their own sex which is natural to
public-school boyhood, even as it is, though perhaps less robustly, to
girlhood. For twelve or thirteen weeks three times a year they live
exclusively among boys, and that at a time when their vigour is at its
strongest, and it would demand of them a fish-like inhumanity, if they
were asked to let their friendships alone have no share of the
tremendous high colours in which their lives are dipped. Naturally there
is danger about it (for what emotion worth having is not encompassed by
perils?) and this strong beat of affection may easily explode into
fragments of mere sensuality, be dissipated in mere “smut” and from
being a banner in the clean wind be trampled into mud. But promiscuous
immorality was, as far as I am aware, quite foreign to the school,
though we flamed into a hundred hot bonfires of these friendships,
which were discussed with a freedom that would seem appalling, if you
forgot that you were dealing with boys and not with men. Blaze after
blaze illumined our excited lives, for without being one whit less
genuine while they lasted, there was no very permanent quality about
these friendships. Your friend or you might get swept into another
orbit; diversity of tastes, promotion in school, conflicting interests
might sever you, and in all friendliness you passed on, with eyes eager
to give or to receive some new shy signal which heralded the approach of
another of these genial passions. For me the sentimentality that
coloured the choir-boy affair, or that not less misbegotten case of Mrs.
Carter had quite faded from my emotional palette, which now was spread
with hues far more robust and healthy. My signals were all made for the
strong and the masculine, and I quite put out my lights and showed a
stony blackness to flutterings from one of mincing walk or elegant
gestures or a conjectured softness of disposition. I loved the children
of the sun, and the friends of rain and wind, who were swift in the
three-quarter line, and played squash with me in the snow; but still, by
some strange law of attraction, too regular for coincidence, they were
most of them musical, and once more, though now without sentimentality,
chapel services, as in the case of the choir-boy and Lincoln Cathedral,
were entwined with my volatile but violent affections. One such friend
sang tenor and I intrigued my corn-crake way back into the choir in
order to sit next him: another led the trebles. He must have been quite
two years younger than myself, which is a gulf wider than two decades in
mature life. But we bridged it with a structure that carried us safely
to each other; there was music in that bridge, and there was the wonder
in young eyes of the fact that you had found (and so had he) a
passionate pilgrim, voyaging through fives-courts and glades of
Savernake, because of whom those external phenomena shone with a new
brightness, so that now the sweep of the forest, and the fives-courts,
and the mire in the football fields, and the inadequate bounding of
balls in an open squash court, owing to the snow that lay soddenly
melting, grew into scenes and settings for the jewels of human
companionships and boyish affections.
Intellectual kinship, community of tastes had very little part in those
friendships: they were founded on a subtle instinct, and they were born
of a blind mutual choice. Often your tentative scouting was quite
stillborn: you would hope for a friendship, and perhaps he would have no
signals for you, but wait wide-eyed and expectant, for somebody quite
different. Or again you could have a “culte” (to adopt an odious
phraseology for which, in English, there happens to be no equivalent)
for someone, who in the sundered worlds of modern and classic schools,
might be miles away, and then with a sudden and wondrous reward, the
idol would give some such signal of glance (that would be a direct
method) or more indirectly, he would say something to his companion as
he happened to pass you in the court, which you knew was really meant
for you, and on your next meeting you would perhaps get a glance, which
was at least an enquiry as to whether you were disposed towards
friendship. And then as you waited in the clear dusk of some summer
evening for the sounding of the boring chapel-bell, you would sit down
on one of the seats round the lime-trees in the court outside, and he
would stroll by, still linked by an arm to some other friend, and you
rather dolefully wondered whether, after all, there was to be anything
doing. The two would be lost in the crowd beginning to collect round the
chapel gate, and then perhaps the figure for which you were watching
would detach itself, alone now, from the others, and with an elaborate
unconsciousness of your presence he would stroll to the seat where you
waited, and with the implacable shyness that always ushered in these
affairs still take no notice of you. As he sat down it may be that a
book dropped from under his arm, and you picked it up for him, and he
said, “Oh thanks! Hullo, is that you?” knowing perfectly well that it
was, and you would say, “Hullo!”... So after each had said, “Hullo,”
one said, “There’s about three minutes yet before stroke, isn’t there?”
and the other replied, “About that,” and then taking the plunge said:
“I say, I’ve got a squash court to-morrow at twelve. Will you have a
game?” and the answer, if things were going well would be, “O ripping;
thanks awfully!”
Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it was time to get up
and go into chapel, with a new joy of life swimming into your ken. Never
did Cortez stare at the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with
which he and you looked at each other as together you passed out of the
dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that game of squash
to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the foundation-stone of the temple
of a new friendship. There would be time enough after that for a dip at
the bathing-place, and a breathless race not to be late for hall....
The ardent affair, if the squash and the bath had been satisfactory,
blazed after that like a prairie fire, and the two became inseparable
for a term, or if not that for a few weeks. But to suppose that this
ardency was sensual is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it
altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely physical is no
doubt true, for it was founded primarily on appearance, but there is a
vast difference between the breezy open-air quality of these friendships
and the dingy sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to them.
A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture their quality, so as to
experience it emotionally, but to confuse it with moral perversion, as
the adult understand that, is merely to misunderstand it.
* * * * *
For a year I sat solid and unmovable in the form in which I had been
placed when I came to Marlborough, and was then hoisted into the lower
fifth, and began a rather swifter climbing of the scholastic ladder,
because I came for the first time under a master who woke in me an
intellectual interest in Greek and Latin. This was A. H. Beesly, who was
by far the most gifted teacher I ever came under either at school or at
the University. Not for me alone but for his whole form he made waters
break out in the wilderness, and irrigated the sad story of Hecuba with
the springs of human emotion. He had translated it himself into English
blank verse, with a prologue that told how some Athenian slave, carried
off to Rome to serve in the household, read to fellow-captives this song
of Zion in his captivity. What the intrinsic merits of the translation
were, I can form no idea, but of the effect of it on his form, as read
by the author, I cherish the liveliest memory. For three or four Hecuba
lessons we would get no reading, and then Beesly would turn round to the
fire when we had stumbled through another thirty lines, and say, “Well
now, you boys don’t know what a fine thing it is. Let’s see what we can
make of your last few lessons. I’ll read you a translation: follow it
in your Greek. We’ll begin at line 130.” Then he would read this
sumptuous jewelled paraphrase, which rendered in English blank verse the
sense of the passages we had droned and plodded through, and gave them
the dramatic significance which we all had missed when we took the
original in compulsory doses of Greek. For a long time we never knew who
was the author of this English version, and then one day Beesly brought
into form a whole bale of copies, printed in sheets, unfolded and uncut,
and gave one to each of us. There was the name on the title page, as
translated by A. H. B., with the heading, “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge.”
Never in bookshop or in second-hand bookstall have I seen a copy of that
work, and I rejoice in that for perhaps I might be disillusioned as to
its merits, if I had seen it subsequently. Certainly “The Trojan Queen’s
Revenge” was printed, but I suspect (and bury the suspicion) that it
fell stillborn from the press, and that the author bought up the unbound
copies. As it is, it has for me the significance of some equerry who
introduced me to the presence of royal Greece, making the Greeks from
that day forth the supreme interpreters of humanity. Under the influence
of “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” I passed through the portals into the
very throne-room of that House of Art, so that to this day I must
secretly always employ a certain Greek standard to whatever the world
holds of beauty. Greek gems, Greek statues, became for me the gold
standard, compared to which all else, though noble, must be of baser
stuff. There were to be many idle terms yet before I cared one atom
about the Greek language intrinsically: as far as the literature went I
only cared for the spirit of it revealed in “The Trojan Queen’s
Revenge.” And before I quitted that form we had pieces of _Œdipus
Coloneus_ brought to our notice, and once again Beesly read out some
translation--I suppose of his own--of the great chorus.
“But if you want the spirit of it,” he said, “listen to this. It’s by a
man called Swinburne, of whom you have probably never heard. Shut your
books.”
I can see him now: it was a chilly day in spring and he put his feet up
on the side of the stove that warmed the classroom. He had closed his
book too, and his blue merry eyes grew grave as he began:
“When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces,
The mother of months in meadow and plain
Fills the hollows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain,
And the bright brown nightingale, amorous,
Is half assuaged for Itylus,
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil and all the pain.”
Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that magic: we were all
quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp
in his hand and he thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling
of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I remember well
that he waited at the end of one stanza, and said, “Shall I finish it or
would you like to go? Any boy who likes may go.”
Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disapproval), and he went on:
“For winter’s rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins,
The day that severs lover from lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins.
And Time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.”
He came to the end of the chorus and got up.
“You can all be ten minutes late next school,” he said, “because I have
kept you.”
Just as I must always think of “The Trojan Queen’s Revenge” as being
among the masterpieces of blank verse in the English language, so I
cannot believe that Beesly was not the finest racket-player who has ever
served that fascinating little hard ball into the side-nick of the
back-hand court. There was a new racket court just built in the corner
of the cricket-field, and here at twelve o’clock on three mornings of
the week, Beesly and another master played the two boys who would
represent the school in the Public Schools racket competition at Easter.
The court, anonymously presented to the school, was announced, when
Beesly retired a few years later, to be his gift, and he provided
practically all the balls used in these games. Hour after hour I used to
watch these matches and began to play myself with the juniors. Beesly
often looked on from the gallery, in order to detect new talent, and on
one imperishable day, as we came out of the court he said to me, “You’ve
got some notion of the game: mind you stick to it.” If I had wanted any
encouragement that would have determined me, and I began to think
rackets and dream rackets and visualize nick-services and half-volley
returns just above the line. Beesly kept a quiet eye on me, and after I
had left his form, he would often ask me to walk up towards his house
with him, if I was going that way, and would ask me to breakfast on
Sunday mornings, and what feasts of the gods were these! Perhaps there
would be one of the school representatives there, and Beesly, when the
sausages and the kidneys were done, would show us the racket cups he had
won, or he would read us something or tend the flowers in his
greenhouse. All this sounds trivial, but he never produced a trivial
effect, and gradually he established over me a complete hold, morally
and mentally, which was as far as I can judge entirely healthy and
stimulating. If he had seen me often with someone whom he considered an
undesirable companion he would fidget and grunt a little and pull his
long whiskers, and then with a glance merry and shy and wholly disarming
he said, “Now there are plenty of people it’s good to see a little of,
but not too much of.” He would mention no name, but he never failed to
convey the sense of his allusion. On the other hand if he thought I was
devoting myself too much to games (and in especial rackets) he would
say, “Nothing makes you enjoy a game of rackets so much as having done a
couple of hours hard work first.” Or if, having watched me playing, he
thought I wasn’t taking the game seriously enough, he would stroll away
with me from the court, and _à propos_ of nothing at all, he would
casually remark, “Better do nothing than do a thing slackly. You’ll find
your games fall off, unless you play as hard as you can.”... And then
up at his house on one ecstatic morning when I was getting on for
seventeen he suddenly said, “You’ll be playing for the school next year
if you take pains.” Next moment he had a volume of Browning in his hand
and said, “Browning now: ever read any Browning? I thought not. Listen
to me for a couple of minutes,” and he read “The Lost Leader.” Once, I
remember, I had been to his house in the evening, and he walked back
with me across the cricket-field after night had fallen. The sky was
clear and a myriad frosty stars burned there. For some little way Beesly
walked in silence, then, in his low distinct voice he began:
“See how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.”
I insist on the apparent triviality and fragmentariness of all this, for
it was just in these ways, not in heavy discourses or lectures on
morality and studiousness and activity, that Beesly gained his
ascendency over me. He was never a great talker, but these _obiter
dicta_ stamped themselves on my mind like some stroke of a steel die on
malleable metal. He was never in the smallest degree demonstrative: he
might have been speaking to a blank wall, except just for that glance,
merry and intimate, which he occasionally showed me, but for all that I
divined a strong affection, which I for my part returned in a glow of
hero-worship. The very fact that he never asked for a confidence
prompted me to tell him all that perplexed or interested me, in the sure
knowledge that he would always throw light in some brief curt sentence.
“Stupid thing to do,” was one of his wise comments when I had told him
of some row I had got into with my house master. “Go and apologize, and
then don’t think anything more about it.” There was the root and kernel
of the matter: down came that steel die, sharply impressing itself,
whereas discursive and laboured advice would have merely been boring and
unconvincing. Off I went, trusting implicitly in his wisdom, and finding
it wholly justified.
And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disappointed Beesly. I
had, as he prophesied, attained to the dignity of playing for the school
at rackets, and had yet another year before I left, and he made up his
mind that I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup for
Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought home. Certainly two
terms before that final event we were an extremely promising pair, but
after that we scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of
staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about this, and in
the Christmas holidays that year I went to stay with him at Torquay, in
order to get more practice, whereas what I needed was less practice.
Even then we made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with
the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till the last day, when
he urged me to take a heroic dose of Hunyadi water, continued to cling
to the idea that at last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed
to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me outside the court, when
we came out; he could hardly speak, but he patted me on the shoulder and
blurted out, “Well, I know you did your best: I know that,” and walked
quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming letter, trying to
console me who really cared far less than he did; for it was, I am
perfectly convinced, the main ambition of his life that Marlborough
should win this cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at
last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the instruments
through whom that ambition was to be realized.
He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, in some such way as
Pindar, who wrote the most magnificent odes the world has ever read in
honour of boys who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric
affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes centred at Queen’s.
The affection I certainly returned, but woe for the manner in which I
failed to fulfil the rest of the contract.
I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly a very lonely one,
and his loneliness no doubt was accentuated to him by his shy reticence.
He kept himself largely apart from other masters; to the best of my
knowledge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time he was
stewing in the affection which he was incapable of expressing. But he
had, out and away, by far the most forcible and attractive personality
of any tutor I came across either at school or the University; he was
one of those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, and loves
for no ostensible reason.