THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF
The dreadful “season of snows and sins” was already beginning to
approach again: in other words more scholarship examinations at Oxford
and Cambridge began to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were
the snows: the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent interest
in the subjects which would make them “big with blessing.” Certainly I
had been sent to school to learn Latin and Greek among other things, but
the other things were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about
tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remember a very serious
letter from my father (after a series of consecutive tenths) saying that
he had always observed that boys who were about tenth, could always do
much better if they chose: boys lower in a form were those who often
tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do not think I was so
diabolically minded as to consider this a reason for doing worse, but
certainly I declined from that modest eminence where boys who could do
better pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen places lower.
By one of those wonderful coincidences which from time to time nourish
starving optimists, it so happened that in the summer of 1884 an
unusually large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen
promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last of which
consisted of myself. With all the dignity and decoration of sixth form
upon me, I had somehow justified my existence again, and the stigma of
being seventeenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the sixth. I
had a study of my own, instead of being one of a herd in a classroom. I
could make small boys fill my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and
I could, without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of my
head.
Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster gave to the new
sixth form at the beginning of the September term, was said about duties
and responsibilities: if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear
without penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, waterproof
to such suggestions, if they come from without he will get his idea of
his duties and responsibilities purely from his own instinct, or rather
from the collective instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of
proper behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely built on
what he and they consider to be “good form.” These commandments are the
most elusive and variable of decalogues, but usually wholesome, and
completely autocratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad
form, though language which would have blistered the paint off a sewer,
was perfectly permissible, if you wished to indulge in it: bullying was
hopelessly beyond the pale, gambling and drinking, which figure so
menacingly in those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for
their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We (the sixth form
generally) were a set of genial and energetic pagans, caring most of all
for each other, next for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work;
indeed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to be industrious
in certain well-defined patches.
Nobody took the very slightest interest in such subjects as French or
mathematics, and considering the way in which they were taught, it would
have been truly remarkable if we had. An aged man, mumbling to himself,
wrote out equations and made pictures of Euclidian proposition on a
blackboard, apparently for his own amusement, without any reference to
his audience. When he had had enough of it, he told us to close all
books, and write out the proposition he had demonstrated. Sometimes you
could, sometimes you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t very frequently, you
had to do it twice and show it up next school. If the aged man
remembered to ask for it, you had forgotten to do it, but usually he
forgot too. But what it was all about was a blank mystery, until it
became necessary to find out, because elementary Euclid and algebra
formed a part of the Oxford and Cambridge certificate examination. When
that approached, we put our heads together and found out for ourselves.
French was equally hopeless: once a week we prepared a couple of pages
of some French history for the headmaster. Whatever French he knew he
certainly did not impart: of the spoken language I had picked up enough
abroad to be aware that he would have been practically unintelligible to
a Frenchman. I believe that both these subjects were admirably taught on
the modern side; on the classical side the study of them was a mere
farce. But at Latin and Greek we worked quite reasonably and
intelligently: it was “good form” to take an interest in them, and it
was not thought the least odd if somebody was found reading the _Apology
of Socrates_ (in a translation) out of school hours, though it had
nothing to do with class-work, or that I treasured a piece of white
marble which my sister Nellie on a foreign tour had picked up on the
Acropolis.
The real interest of life centred in “the Alley,” a passage running
above a couple of classrooms in the school buildings, out of which on
each side opened minute studies inhabited by sixth-form in-college boys.
Some of these were double studies shared by two occupants, but most were
single; inviolable castles if the owner chose to shut the door. Inside
there was room for a table, a hanging bookcase, and perhaps three chairs
if you sat close; but who would dream of measuring Paradise by cubic
contents? Never surely was there a more harmonious democracy, and it was
seldom that doors were shut; the inhabitants, unless tied to their
books, drifted up and down and round and round like excited bubbles in
some loquacious backwater. Within the limits of “good form” every
freedom of action and opinion was allowed, and those limits were really
very reasonable ones. It must not be supposed that “good form” was ever
discussed at all: it was merely the unwritten, unspoken code, which held
things together, and undoubtedly the gravest offense against it was a
hint of condescension or superiority. If you were so fortunate as to get
into the school fifteen or achieve any distinction, “the Alley” pooled
the credit, and woe be to any who showed “side” to the Alleyites. If you
liked (hardly anybody did) to be extremely neat in dress, to get
yourself up to kill, to wear buttonholes, you were perfectly at liberty
to do so; but if you showed the least “swank” over your rosebud, the
witnesses of your enormity would probably stroll thoughtfully away and
return embellished with dandelions and groundsel. That was sarcasm,
popularly called “sarc,” and was a weapon ruthlessly employed towards
the superior person. No one could stand a conspiracy of “sarc” for
long: it was better to mend your ways and reduce your swollen head. Only
one member of the Alley was ever known to resist a continual course of
“sarc,” and he, poor fellow, was goaded by the shafts of love, for he
adored to distraction one of the masters’ daughters who appeared unaware
of his existence. This was unusual conduct, but he was at liberty to
squander emotion on her if he wished; what roused the Alley to arms, so
that they loaded themselves with “sarc,” as with hand grenades, was that
he affected to despise all who were not enslaved by some pretty-faced
maiden. Then, as was right, he found hairpins mysteriously appearing on
his carpet, and heard his Christian name called in faint girlish
falsetto from a neighbouring study, and discovered notes with passionate
declarations of love and a wealth of suggestive allusions that I would
no longer “pollewt” my pen with describing nestling in his coat-pocket.
But such was the innate depravity of his amorous heart that he really
didn’t seem to mind the most withering “sarc.”... Games were not
compulsory in the sixth, and in consequence, though athletes were in the
majority, athleticism was no longer automatic, and now a boy would
suffer no loss of esteem, or offend any sense of decency, if he chose
not to play any game whatever. A wide tolerance for your fellows was the
first lesson of the Alley; liberty, equality, and fraternity were its
admirable guides to life.
Next year, when, by another intervention of Providence, I suddenly found
myself head of my house, with a magnificent apartment next the bathroom
for my habitation, the snowstorm of scholarship examinations burst over
me. For a suitable inducement in the shape of a scholarship or
exhibition, I was prepared to go to New, Magdalen, or Worcester at
Oxford, or to King’s College, Cambridge; but not a single one of these
ancient (or shall we say antiquated?) seats of learning would, after
examining me, put their hands in their pockets in order to secure me. I
was very busy at the time, for I was editing _The Marlburian_ and
conducting the school “Penny Readings,” and playing football for them
and rackets, and not being able to find time for everything I let my
school-work slide altogether and, when the depressing results came out,
bore failure with admirable fortitude. In other words, I did not care at
all; if anything, I was rather pleased, because I began dimly to
conceive the possibility of being allowed to stop at school for an extra
year, whereas I should normally have left in the summer. But Marlborough
was now to me the most amiable of dwellings; there were friends there
whom I could not bear the thought of parting with; there were schemes
that I could not bear to leave unfulfilled, and I directed all the
ingenuity of which I was capable to secure my remaining here for an
unheard-of year longer. From being resigned to failure I passed, as my
plans matured, into being enraptured with it. A false step, a misplaced
interview, might spell ruin, and after much thought I went to the
headmaster with a homily all about myself. It was clear that I had not
attained a decent standard of scholarship yet; surely my coming years at
the University would be more profitable if I was better prepared to take
advantage of them? My father was bent on my having a career of some
distinction there, and would not he be far more likely to find his
ambitions for me realized if I made there the better start that another
year at school would give me? Another year now of undiluted classics....
This scheme enlisted his sympathy, and he said he would talk to my
house-master about it, who might not, however, want to keep me in such
august seniority. But as to that I had no doubt whatever, for this
gentleman had only just come to the house, and his seat in the saddle
was at present remarkably uncertain. He used to ask members of the
sixth, and in especial the head of the house, to go the rounds for him
when it was the hour for him to parade the dormitories at night; he
would do anything to shirk disciplinary contact if a senior member of
the house could accomplish this for him. No senior member of the house
felt the slightest nervousness at what so terrified the house-master: we
visited the dormitories, sat on a bed here and there, talking to
friends, helped a straggler who had not finished a construing lesson for
the morning, and eventually went back to the house-master’s room to say
good night and report that all was well. Then he gave you a slice of
cake, and tried to conceal his pipe, and hoped that nobody in the house
smoked (which, as a matter of fact, they didn’t), and everything was
very pleasant and comfortable. The house was behaving quite well,
because prefects and senior boys had it well in hand; but if I left, my
successor as head of the house was bound to be a very mild, spectacled
youth, and, without conceit, I felt sure that my house-master would
prefer to keep me, who during this last year had managed it quite nicely
for him. His attitude came off according to plan, and we had quite an
affecting interview.
Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and I got both him
and the headmaster to write to my father urging him to allow me to stop
another year, not only for my own good (interview A), but for the
well-being of the house (interview B). The double appeal was successful:
it was settled that I should stay for another year, and then go up to
King’s College, Cambridge. As I would be over nineteen when the next
scholarship examination came round, I was ineligible on account of
advanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next vexing my
contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm on the sunny slopes of
antiquity. I had no notion of using this extra year of life (for so it
appeared then) for idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at
subjects that would eventually “tell.” I meant also, with a suspicion of
priggishness, to make the house streak a meteor-like path across the
starry sky of school. We were going to be a model of enlightenment (this
was the ambition); we were to win the racket house-cup, and the fives
cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, and the singing cup
(for, like the Meistersingers, every house competed in singing), and two
vocal quartettes, triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup.
There it was--forty boys were to be drilled into winning every event of
this immense pentathlon. A sixth cup, possibly within the range, was the
cricket cup; but in the matter of cricket the house generally was no
more than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five cups seemed
within the limits of probable achievement, and who knew but that a
breezy eleven, rather ignorant of cricket, except for the presence of
the best left-hand bowler in the school, might not effect some
incredible miracle? Never has anybody’s head been so stuffed full of
plans as was mine when I went back a year later than was reasonable for
this series of inconceivable excitements.
The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. We had already been
great friends for many terms, and now this friendship ripened into a
unique alliance; from morning till night we were together, and seethed
in projects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport or
industry in which we were not associated. No matter came up within the
jurisdiction of either of us in which each did not consult the other. He
was going up for a classical scholarship at King’s, Cambridge, for we
had quite settled not to have done with each other when school was over.
I had to get to learn some classics somehow, and so together we
concocted the most delightful plan, namely, that we should neither of us
do any French, mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming
into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, devoting
ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. The headmaster most
sensibly saw and sanctioned our point, and consequently we had a whole
holiday one day a week, and on two other days only one hour in school.
For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, that browsing at will in
Attic and Roman pastures, gave me precisely all I had lacked before; the
two dead languages stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the
sinews and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, and the
winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon them. Four years ago
Beesly had awakened in me the sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but
not till now had the flame spread to the language. That for me had
always smouldered and smoked under the damp of grammar and accents; now,
when I could learn as I chose, it flared up. Prosody and inflexions,
moods and cases, all that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be
learned by rule; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me merely by
incessantly coming across examples of them, and I began to learn under
the tuition of admiration. The same thrilled interest invaded Latin
also, and it was no longer what could be made of the languages in
English that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. Such study
did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it gave me what was of much
greater value to one who did not mean to spend his life in editing
school-books, namely, an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language
and joy in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic standpoint
it added the stimulus which enabled me not to remain at Cambridge such a
hopeless dunce at classics as I had hitherto always been. All the
teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such
intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had
never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days
of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and
optatives.... With that illumination a great light shone on English
also: in the galloping race of composition at home I, at any rate, had
much preferred to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into the
sea of English literature, reading fast, reading carelessly, but reading
rapturously. I bought the six-volume edition of Browning out of the
money I won over school-fives, which should have been devoted to the
purchase of a silver cup; a successful competition in rackets landed the
works of Dickens, and in the hours when I should naturally have done
mathematics and French and history, these shared with Juvenal and
Aristophanes the honey of the flying minutes. Then came the need to
imitate which always besets the budding author, and if you searched in
the proper pages of _The Marlburian_ you would surely disinter some
specimens that aimed at Addison and stanzas which could never have found
their printer, had there not been in my study a well-thumbed copy of
Tennyson’s early lyrics.
There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: four of us were
joint editors, producers, and proprietors of that school paper. Who the
two others were I have no idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote
the greater part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he,
and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of its four
editors. Domestically he knew something about printing and pulls and
proofs, which had escaped the experience of his friend and the family
printing press, and that year _The Marlburian_, as I hope it is now, was
a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished tradesman, paid the
printing bills, audited the accounts, and flowed back to his
collaborators a Pactolus of large silver pieces. We wrote indignant
letters signed “A Parent,” and answered them with withering rejoinders
signed “Another Parent”; we invented abuses, and firmly denied them; we
cut down the habitual drowsy accounts of house matches to the smallest
paragraphs and spread a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that
football was the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of
boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a fragment of “The
Princess” was dug up and edited and amended by Dry-as-Dust; or
recommended the school generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the
football captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it along the
road, in order to enliven the stupid act of purposeless running. In this
latter point we set the example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops
down the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the staff of
masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, going out for a run with our
hoops, passed the open door of a class-room at an hour when the lower
school was at work, on which a demented master sent out two junior boys
with orders to capture the hoops and bring them in to him. Now, there
was nothing immoral about hoops, nor was there any school rule that
forbade their employment, and so we went very briskly along down the
Bath road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, and when
they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. They panted up, and said
they had been told to take away the hoops and bring them back to Mr.
Sharpe, and so, very politely, we said, “Come and take them.” Naturally
they could make no serious attempt to take away the hoops of the head of
the school and the captain of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little
conversation, we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why
did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the hoops of two big
boys who happened to choose to bowl hoops? We soon got tired of the
habit, but it was great fun to write indignant letters to _The
Marlburian_ about hoops signed “Magister,” and scathing replies signed
“Discipulus.” It made excellent selling stuff for the paper, and boys
who had never dreamed of buying a _Marlburian_ before put their
threepence down with a spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that
there was a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of “sarc” in it.
There were real letters as well from dignified Old Marlburians,
beginning “Has it come to this?” ...
To all these entrancing topics the editors gave their serious
consideration. They herded together for consultation, and rejected each
other’s contributions with suave impartiality, and when they had settled
what they wished to print, Eustace measured it, and usually said that
there was too much. If it was all very precious a double number (price
sixpence) was decreed; if not, a Socratic dialogue or some trifle of
that kind was cut out. Three out of the four would be very
complimentary to the baffled author, and assure him that they found his
contribution most amusing, and if that did not soothe the rejection of
it, they would grow more candid, and say it was beastly rot. When that
was disposed of there might perhaps be a few inches of column to spare,
and we inserted an advertisement that a sixth form boy was willing to
exchange his hoop (nearly new) for a set of false teeth. Luckily someone
remembered that a mathematical master had false teeth, and would be
liable to think that this was “sarc” directed at him, and some answers
to non-existent correspondents were put in instead. By that time the
cake would be finished and the teapot dry, and Eustace took the MSS. to
the printers, and I went to conduct a rehearsal of Haydn’s Symphony for
the approaching Penny Reading, and ask Harry Irving what he was going to
recite at it.
These Penny Readings which took place once a term were an entirely
delightful institution. _Qui docebant jam docentur_, as the _Carmen_
told us, for the whole of this musical and dramatic entertainment was
got up, rehearsed (to whatever stage of efficiency), conducted and
performed by boys without any help from masters. There were piano solos,
part-songs, vocal solos or duets, and perhaps some reading or
representation, say, of the trial scene in _Pickwick_. But this year the
Penny Readings included grim and finished recitations by Harry Irving,
who “drew” in a manner so unprecedented, that instead of holding them in
the “Bradleian,” a hall of but moderate dimensions, Upper School itself,
capable of holding the entire body of boys and masters, had to be
requisitioned. It fell to my lot to conduct the musical part of the
entertainment, and this year we audaciously rehearsed and performed
Haydn’s Toy Symphony, in which, for a special treat, we allowed Mr.
Bambridge to play the cuckoo. There he sat, rapturously cheered as he
mounted to the platform with his little wooden tube, lean and grave with
a steady eye fixed on the conductor’s baton. It had been arranged that
the cuckoo, otherwise so obedient and punctual in its flutings, should
at one point run amuck altogether, and go on saying “cuckoo” in spite of
the efforts of the conductor to silence it. On it went till the roars of
the audience entirely drowned its voice, and when silence was restored,
it gave one more “cuckoo,” _pianissimo prestissimo_, just to show that
it was quite unrepentant.... But more than anything did Harry Irving’s
recitations bring down the house. In appearance he was his father, young
and amazingly good-looking, and he had all the assurance and grip of a
mature actor: he stalked and he paused, he yelled and he whispered, and
he withered us with horror in some appalling little soliloquy by a dying
hangman, round whose death-bed the ghosts of his victims most
unpleasantly hovered. Then in the manner of a parson he gave us a short
sermon on the moral lesson “to be drawn from, dear brethren, that
exquisite gem of English poetry, ‘Mary had a little larm.’”
The athletic ambitions of the first of these three terms was of course
to win the football cup in house-ties, and also all the school matches.
Neither quite came off, for the house was beaten in the final, while the
school only made a moderate show in its foreign matches. But there was
little time for moaning. Close on the heels of that disappointment came
the Lent term with its fives, rackets and singing cups, and there was
then no cause for anything but jubilation. At Easter came the dreadful
fiasco of the Public School rackets in London, and following on that,
the house was again knocked out in the final at cricket. Never shall I
forget the heaviness of heart with which I came down that day from the
cricket-field, due, not to the fact only of defeat--for even if we had
won, that sense of finality would have been there--but because for me
all the zeal and the struggle, with its failures and successes, of these
entrancing school games, was over. Not again could games, so I dimly and
correctly realized, have quite that absorbing and pellucid quality which
distinguished house matches: there was already forming in my mind, now
that the last of these competitions was over, a certain dingy philosophy
clouding the brightness, which recognized that games were amusements, to
be taken as such. They might give exhilaration and enjoyment, but not
again would they produce that unique absorption. I could not imagine
again caring quite as much as I had cared during these last six years.
Some hour had struck, and not alone for games, but for the multitudinous
aims that had been bounded by the chapel wall on one side, the master’s
garden on another, the field where was the racket court and the football
grounds in winter and the cricket pitches in summer, on the third and
fourth sides. There was the _angulus terræ_, which, apart from brief
holidays, had constituted the whole of life for the vision of a boy.
Apart from Addington, there was nothing in the whole round world that
mattered like those few acres, and the glory which exuded out of their
very soil.
Dimly I conjectured that in a few months Marlborough would be withdrawn
into some bright starry orbit of its own, as far as I was concerned,
revolving there with a sundered light in which I should no longer
share, and that soon I should peer for it through the fog of the years
that drifted across it. Some other orbit was to be mine, which, when I
began to move in it, would no doubt have a heaven of its own to scour
through, but as yet it had no significance for me; it was dim and
uncharted. Still incurably boyish, in spite of the nineteen years which
were verging on the twentieth, I felt that I was being cast out of the
only place that mattered. I suppose I knew in some dull logical way,
that it was otherwise: that inexorable Time which sent me forth out of
this mature infancy had something left in store, but to the eyes of
nineteen, everyone who is thirty, at any rate, must clearly be a sere
and yellow leaf, waiting for an autumnal blast to make an end of him in
the fall of withered foliage. Life might be possible up to twenty-five
or so, but then beyond doubt senility must be moribund and slobbering.
“Thirty at least” was the verdict then: “Thirty at most” was so soon
substituted for it. For the first time in my life I had the definite
sense of a book read through and loved from cover to cover, being
closed, the sense of an “end,” a finished period. Hitherto, change of
home or the leaving of a private school had been not an “end” but a
beginning: though one experience was finished the opening of a new one,
of fresh places, fresh conditions had made the old just slip from the
fingers of a careless hand, without sense of loss. But now my fingers
clung desperately to what was slipping away: they did not clutch at that
which was coming, but tightened, as the smooth days hurtled by, on that
which they still just held.
The last game that mattered “frightfully” had been already played, the
last number of _The Marlburian_ came out, and while one half of me would
have chosen that the full moon of July should know no wane, the other
would willingly have seen her turn to ashes, and fall like a cinder from
the sky, to match the days from which the glow and the radiance were
dying in the frost of the coming departure. Inanimate objects, beloved
and familiar, like the row of lime trees in the court with the circular
seats round them, my house-study with the copies of Turner water-colours
by my sister, the Alley and its noisy merry staircase, began to wear a
strange aspect, for, so soon, they would have passed completely into
other occupation. Drop by drop, like the sweet drippings from the limes,
the honey was oozing from them, leaving empty cells and alien
habitations.
In especial there was a certain covered columned passage, a paved and
roofed pergola close to the sixth form class-room where so often I had
waited for the advent of a friend. In stormy south-westerly weather the
rain beat into it, but it was a good meeting-place, for the Alley, the
Upper School, the sixth form room and the Bradleian made it a junction
for passengers, and there was a board up with school-notices, promotions
into the eleven and the fifteen and whatnot, to while away the waiting.
A congregation of steps would come there as some form was released, but
he was not there: then would come a few scattered steps, but not his.
And then he would come round a corner, in a blustering hurry, and say,
“Oh, sorry,” and together we went up to the house-study madly alive, and
sanely content. Those minutes of anticipation made the columned pergola
more vivid than even the house-study or the Alley or the lime trees, and
in so short a while it would all be dead, as a piece of scenery
remaining on a stage, where others should play their friendly and
wholesome parts. If I had had that which in the cant phrase is called
“the corporate sense,” I suppose the great thing would have been that
generations of others should do as I had done, and I should have said my
grace, and got up thankfully from the delicate and vigorous feast.
Instead I was Oliver and asked for more, and every year since I have
wanted more of some quality that is inseparable from the wonder and
sunset of boyhood. But now the sun was notched by the hills over which I
must soon climb, where lay the untravelled country: its last rays were
level over the plain, and before this last week of July was over, only
high up on the peaks of memory away to the east would the rose linger.
That, too, so I dismally supposed, would fade presently, but there I was
wrong. It has never faded nor lost one atom of its radiance.
There were rejoicings and jubilations to be gone through: the advent of
Nellie for prize-giving, in which at last it was my lot to make several
excursions to the table where morocco-bound books were stacked. There
was a house-supper on the last day of all in celebration of the winning
of those challenge cups, which was gratifying also, but below that was
the sound of the passing-bell. All that day it sounded, except just at
the moment when I should have expected it to be most unbearably
funereal. For the friend for whom I had so often waited in the colonnade
came up with me to the cricket pavilion, from which I had to take away
blazers and bat and cricketing paraphernalia, and having got them
stuffed inside my bag, we sat on the steep bank overlooking the field to
wait for the first stroke of the chapel-bell. Other groups were straying
about the grass, and some came and talked for a bit, and we wished they
would go away, because nobody else was wanted just then. It was not
that there was anything particular to say, for boys don’t say much to
one another, and we lay on the grass, and chewed the sweet ends of it,
and when not silent, talked of perfectly trivial things. And at last the
friend rolled over on to his face and said:
“Oh, damn!”
“Why?” I asked, knowing quite well.
“Because it will be awful rot without you.”
“You’ll soon find somebody else,” said I.
“Funny,” said he.
“Laugh then,” said I.
He sat up, nursing his knees in his arms, and looking down over the
field. Just below was the stretch of grass where house football-ties
were played in the winter, to the left was Beesly’s house, and at the
bottom of the field the racket court. Beyond and below across the road
the chapel and the red school-buildings. Then his eyes came back from
their excursion.
“It’s been ripping anyhow,” he said. “Did two fellows ever have such a
good time?”
Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should have been loudest,
it ceased altogether. The whole of my dismal maunderings about days that
were dead and years that were past, I knew to be utterly mistaken.
Nothing that was worth having was dead or past at all: it was all here
now, and all mine, a possession eternally alive.
“But did they?” he repeated, as I did not answer.
“Never. Nor will. And there’s chapel-bell. Get up.”
He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his clothes.
“Psalms this morning,” he said telegraphically.
“I know. ‘Brethren and companions’ sake.’ Didn’t think you had noticed.”
“Rather. Good old Psalm.”
I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry it. A handle
came off.
“Ass,” said I.
“Well, it was three-quarters off already,” said he. “Come on; we shall
be late. You can leave it at the porter’s lodge.”
“Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully,” said I.
“Sarc,” said he.
* * * * *
There was Beesly on the platform next day when I got to the station, and
I remembered he had asked me what train I was going by. He just nodded
to me, and continued looking at volumes on the bookstall. But just as
the whistle sounded, he came to the carriage door.
“Just came to see you off,” he said. “Don’t forget us all.”