CAMBRIDGE
The whole family went that summer holiday to the Lakes, where my father
had taken the Rectory of Easedale, and in that not very commodious house
five children, two parents and Beth all managed to shelter themselves
from the everlasting rain that deluged those revolting regions. Had not
steep muddy hills separated one lake from another, I verily believe that
the Lakes must have become one sheet of mournful water with a few Pikes
and Ghylls sticking up like Mount Ararat on another occasion that can
scarcely have been more rainy. There was fishing to be had, but no fish:
you might as well have fished in the rapids of Niagara as cast a fly on
the streams, while the lakes themselves are noted for their depths of
barren water. Out we used to go in mackintoshes, and back we came in
mackintoshes, and I cannot suppose that thirty years later the Rectory
at Easedale can have lost its smell of wet india-rubber and drying
homespuns. As a special contribution to the general discomfort Nellie
discovered and developed a grand sort of ailment called “pleurodynia,”
which I suppose is the result of never being dry, and I capped that by
cultivating the most orange-coloured jaundice ever seen, and continued
being violently sick when you would have thought there was nothing to be
sick with.
But these atrocious tempests gave my father unlimited scope for what
his irreverent family called “The Cottar’s Saturday Night.” Best of all
situations in the holidays he loved to have his entire family sitting
close round him busy, silent and slightly unreal to their own sense,
while he “did” his Cyprian. There he sat with his books and papers in
front of him, at the end of a table in a smallish room, with all of us
sitting there, each with his book, speaking very rarely and very
quietly, so as not to disturb him, and everybody, alas, except him,
slightly constrained. In these holidays, Hugh, owing to inveterate
idleness at Eton (where, beating me, he had got a scholarship), had a
tutor to whom he paid only the very slightest attention, and on these
evenings he would have some piece of Horace to prepare for next day, and
would work at it for a little, and then drop his dictionary with a loud
slap on the floor. Soon he would begin to fidget, and then catch sight
of Arthur reading, and something in his expression would amuse him. He
drew nearer him a piece of sermon paper which Nellie’s pen was busy
devouring on behalf of the next _Saturday Magazine_, and began making a
caricature. At the same moment perhaps I would observe below lowered
eyelids that Arthur was drawing me, and so I began to draw my mother,
and Nellie catching the infection, began to draw Maggie. (If you gave
her pulled-back hair and a tall forehead, the family would easily
recognize it.) And then perhaps my father, pausing in his work, would
see Hugh with his tongue protruding from the corner of his mouth (for
that is the posture in which you can draw best) and say:
“Dear boy, have you finished your preparation for to-morrow? What are
you doing?”
Hugh would allow he hadn’t quite finished his preparation, not having
begun it, and my father would look at his drawing, and his mouth, the
most beautiful that ever man had, would uncurl, until perhaps he threw
back his head and laughed with that intense merriment that was so
infectious. Possibly he might not be amused, and a little grave rebuke
followed; he returned to his Cyprian and we all sat quiet again. But the
criticism of the family was that this was “Papa’s game, and he made the
rules.” For he, unable to get on with his Cyprian, or arriving at the
end of a bit of work, would interrupt at will the mumness which was
imposed on his behalf. But if Maggie or I finished what we were doing,
we might not make general conversation.... And then the door would open,
and Beth looked in, and said, “Eh, it’s dressing-time,” and her lovely
old face would grow alight with love when she looked on my mother, her
child of the elder family, and five more of her children of the second
generation. From my father there would always be a delicious word of
welcome for her, and he would say:
“Beth, you’re interrupting us all. Go away. Your watch is wrong.”
“Nay, sir, it isn’t,” said Beth--she always said “sir” to him, whatever
his title was--“It’s gone half-past seven.” And she beamed and nodded,
perfectly at ease in this solemn assembly. With her (who counted of
course as one of it) there were eight in that little stuffy room, where
we fidgeted and sat and read. And what would not I give, who with one
other alone survive from those evenings, to have an hour of them again,
in that inconvenient proximity, surrounded by the huge love of a family
so devoted and critical of each other, with the two amongst them whom
nobody criticized, my mother with her spectacles on her forehead, and
Beth looking in at the door?
Then jaundice descended on me like the blur of a London fog, and through
the depression of it, there seemed no ray that could penetrate. But my
mother managed to effect that entry, as of course she always would, and
she came back one dripping afternoon from Grasmere, with a packet in her
hand.
“As it’s all so hopeless,” she said, “I bought some lead soldiers. Oh,
do let us have a battle.”
She poured a torrent of these metal warriors on to a table by my bed.
There were cannons with springs that shot out peas, and battalions of
infantry, and troops of cavalry. It was she, you must understand, who
wanted to play soldiers, and to a jaundiced cynic of twenty that
necessarily was quite irresistible. Who could have resisted a mother who
_asked_ you at her age to play soldiers? We shot down regiments at a
time, for when you enfilade a line of lead soldiers with a pea, if you
hit the end man, he topples against the next one, and the next against
the next, till there are none left standing. The peas flew about the
room, rattled against washing-basins and tapped at the window-panes, and
I felt much better. Then we bombarded Beth who came to know if I
wouldn’t like some dinner, and as I wouldn’t, it was time to go to
sleep.
“A nice little bit of beef,” began Beth.
“If you say beef again, I shall be sick,” said the invalid.
“Nay, you won’t,” said Beth hopefully.
Then to my mother:
“Eh, dear, do go and dress,” she said, “or you’ll keep everybody
waiting.”
My mother shot a final pea.
“I won’t be the conventional mother,” she said, “and smooth your pillow
for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoe after dinner to see if you’re
asleep. But, my darling, I _know_ you’ll be better to-morrow! Won’t
you?”
* * * * *
King’s College, Cambridge, whither my father accompanied me in October,
had, scarcely twenty years previously, become an open College; for
centuries before that, it had been, as was originally the intention of
the pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation consisting of
Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. If a boy, say, at the age of
twelve, won a scholarship at Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation
there, it followed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he
obtained in due rotation, without any further examination, a King’s
scholarship, when he went up to the University. After that, often while
he was still an undergraduate, he became a fellow of King’s, and for the
rest of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with commons,
lodging, and an income of £200 a year provided he did not marry, till he
became a senior fellow, when his emolument was doubled. At the time of
its foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent endowment for
the encouragement of learning and the education of priests, but long
before this Etonian sanctuary, consisting of fellows and scholars, was
violated by the rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system
had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachronisms, that take
rank with such institutions as pocket-boroughs, where the local magnate
could nominate his own friends to represent the views of the nation in
Parliament.
The founder’s idea had been that from year to year the band of scholars
going up from Eton should keep the torch of learning alight, and grow
old in celibate fineness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some
very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and given stately
leisure for the prosecution of their studies and the advancement of
sound learning, but such a system was liable to many abuses, and as a
matter of fact, acutely suffered from them. A Fellow of King’s, thus
supported for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compulsion to
study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, boarded, and supplied
with a pocket-money of £200 or £400 a year, without doing anything at
all to earn it. Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of
this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the case in a
monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot tasks and duties to the
fellows. Some, of course, did tutorial work among the scholars, but for
the rest, who might or might not, according to their own inclination,
work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and a man with no
ambition in his work, meeting his fellows only once a day at the high
table in Hall, if he chose to go there, and otherwise living alone might
easily turn into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died not so
long before I went up, was never seen outside his rooms till dusk began
to fall: then he would totter, stick in hand, out on to the great grass
lawn in the court, and poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to
himself, “Ah, damn you, you haven’t got me yet!” After this edifying
excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no more till dusk
next day. All his life since the age of twelve or so, the bounty of
Henry VI had supported him, and until the worms finally did “get” him,
nothing could deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the
intention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be conjectured from
the list of the fellows, which from first to last contains no name of
the slightest eminence or distinction as a scholar, except that of the
late Walter Headlam, who was not an Etonian.
The reconstruction of King’s took place some years before I went up, and
no more of these life-fellows were appointed. Henceforth fellowships
expired at the end (I think) of six years, though they could be
prolonged if the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was
engaged in such research as made it proper that his term should be
extended. But such men as were already life-fellows were not shorn of
their fellowships, and whether or no they were resident, whether or not
they were engaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held to
be congruous to the intention of the founder, they were still entitled
for life to their income, their commons, and dinner, and if they chose
to reside in the college to a set of fellows’ rooms. At that time the
college buildings would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and
freshmen, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings outside college;
but in spite of this certain life-fellows still clung to their
privileges, and continued to retain sets of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings,
which they never occupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic
work in London, used to come up for a week or two at the end of the
Christmas term, but for the rest of the year his rooms stood vacant,
while two others, who to the best of my knowledge never appeared in
Cambridge at all, had another set of rooms, which were used merely as
guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of survivals such as the
founder never contemplated was ancient and dusky in appearance, and
never left King’s at all, though he took no part in the academic life of
the place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupying himself
otherwise with making faint wailings on a violin.... But a friend of
mine and I chanced on the discovery that if you whistled as he crossed
the court to chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause,
proceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle would make him
retrace his steps, and it was possible by continuing to whistle, to
drive him back to his rooms. This was extremely interesting, but the
cause baffled conjecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite
seclusion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long believed
to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with a leg of cold mutton
on the sideboard and a table laid as for dinner, and was induced to play
the violin at college concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder)
he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared from these
haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine that the founder contemplated
that the head of the college should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes,
though resident, was approaching or had already reached his ninetieth
year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the Provost’s Lodge. I am sure
I never set eyes on him at all; he took no part whatever in college
business, as indeed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but
there he had lingered on from year to year without a single thought of
resignation entering his venerable head. Though totally past work, he
was Provost of King’s and Provost of King’s he remained, a drone
apparently imperishable.
Others, however, of these life-fellows justified themselves by a busy
existence; there was the Vice-Provost, Augustus Austen Leigh, who
performed all the presidential duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J.
E. Nixon, Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to
undergraduates, and Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London,
who surely made up for these drones who abused the bounty of the
founder, by his prodigious activities. In appearance he was the oddest
of mortals, a little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he
went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows’ Garden, a black tail-coat,
and boots of immense length, of which the toes pointed sharply upwards.
He had only one hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial,
covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only one eye, and that
the right, but the other was marvellously sharp. He made a tennis-ball
to nestle in the crook of his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his
body flung it into the air and severely served it.
His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on some delirious
and unintelligible business. “Show me a man with a green nose,” he once
passionately exclaimed, “and I’ll believe in ghosts.” He had a voice as
curious as his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of a
wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every week he held a
glee-singing meeting after Hall in his rooms, and refreshed his choir
with Tintara wine, hot tea-cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and
rounds and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, as he
got shriller and more excited, would slip from his hand and fly with
prodigious velocity across the room. He always took the part of first
tenor, and whoever gave the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in
order to hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If
it was obviously out of range he would say (running all his
words into each other like impressions on blotting paper):
“SurelythatsratherhighisthatonlyA?”... Then the unaccountable mistake
was discovered and we started again. Where he found all these rounds
and catches I cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have
heard in Nixon’s room has never reached my ears again, nor have I ever
seen anyone, except those who attended these meetings, who was
acquainted with the following catch. It started _Lento_, and, under the
strokes of the paper-knife quickened up to _andante_ and _allegro_, and
ended _prestissimo possibile_. The words ran thus, starting with a first
tenor lead:
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,
I must lengthen the debate,
The debate.
Pray support the chair!
Pray support the chair!
Mr. Speaker, though ’tis late,
I must lengthen the debate.
Question! question! Order! order!
Hear him! Hear him! Hear him! Hear!
(_Da capo: da capo: da capo._)
Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over “Order! Order!”
grew louder and louder, until the whole kennel was a yelp, and when
everyone was quite exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable,
Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown out of his hand)
with a loud bang on the table and wiped his face and laughed for
pleasure. Then he poured out Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars,
while he tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and tried to
find “I loved thee beautiful and kind.”
Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, his mind chiefly
ran on argument and on what he called “starting a hare.” He would
advance some amazing
[Illustration: “HER GRACE” (A DOMESTIC CARICATURE)
[Page 219]
proposition, such as “Why shouldn’t we all--no, that wouldn’t do, but
why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees in the morning, and work in the
evening?” He argued about the most casual topic: if you said, “It’s a
fine day,” he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something he was
carrying, and said, “It all depends on what you mean by fine. If you
mean sun and blue sky, granted; but why shouldn’t you call it fine if
there are buckets of rain? It all depends what you mean by ‘fine.’ A
fish now----”
“I meant an ordinary fine day,” began his bewildered guest.
“Very well: but I say ‘fish.’ I’m a fish and you’re a fish. To a fish
probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, and there you are.”
There you were: long before anybody else Nixon had invented the art of
preposterous conversation, which Mr. Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar
Wilde. To Nixon it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a
science, a product of definite reasoning. He would not change the
subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes (often by himself),
but would confidently blow on the cinders, expecting some
unconjecturable Phœnix to arise from them.
By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar Browning, without
mention of whom no adequate idea of Cambridge life in the late eighties
and early nineties can possibly be arrived at. Though King’s was in
large measure a college quite apart from the rest of the University,
giving itself (so said the rest of the University) unwarrantable airs,
Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler to designate as O.B. for he was never
known otherwise) pervaded not King’s only, but the whole of Cambridge,
with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and rotund
youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really challenged by the
most devout of his competitors, for who except O.B. at the age of
forty-five or so, ever bought a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic
frame in order to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the
Duke of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir-presumptive
to the English throne? I was still a junior at Marlborough when these
Homeric events happened, but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking
about the “awfully jolly” games of hockey he had with Prince Eddy....
Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, which he certainly did,
affords a key to the intensity of his activities.
He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a bicycle with
funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of Turkish baths and Grand
Dukes, and Taormina and English history, I observed that he stuck fast
in a muddy place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him out of
it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of the kind, for some casual
youth was on the path beside his enmired tricycle to whom he said:
“Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha!”
“Charlie old boy,” with his face a-shine with smiles, gave the required
push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I swooped and swerved along the road in
order to go very slowly.
“Charlie is my gyp’s son,” he said. “Such a jolly boy. Thanks awfully,
Charlie. Well, there I was, when the Grand Duke’s yacht came into
Taormina. And, by the way, do you know the Maloja? The Crown-Princess of
Germany came there one year when I was in the hotel, so I dressed myself
like a Roman proconsul, in a white toga of bath towels, ha, ha,
and--and--really these ruts are most annoying--and a laurel wreath, and
went out to meet her Royal Highness. I had a retinue of four young men
who were staying at the hotel as lictors, with axes and sticks, and I
read a short address to her to welcome her, and we had lunch together,
and played lawn-tennis and it was all awfully jolly and friendly and
unconventional. Why aren’t we all natural, instead of being afraid of
poor Mrs. Grundy, whose husband surely died so long ago? She has never
married again, which shows she must be a most unpopular female. Most
females, I notice, are so unpopular: they never know when they’re
wanted, and their hearts are always bigger than their heads. Not of
course your dear mother--those charming Lambeth garden parties--and dear
Lady Salisbury. I saw the Queen when I was at Balmoral last year--my
bootlace has come undone, so careless of Charlie not to notice it--and
how hopelessly benighted is Cambridge altogether! Lord Acton came to
stay with me the other day--I think my tricycle wants oiling--and dined
with me at the High Table. Nixon was sitting on his other side,
propounding conundrums about bed-makers, and hoping that he would sing
glees with him. Ha! Ha! Every boy ought to realize his youth, instead of
wasting his energies over elegiacs. When the Grand Duke came into
Taormina----”
It is really impossible to render the variety of O.B.’s general
conversation, of which the foregoing is but a dim reproduction. His
performances, too (the expression of himself in deeds), were just as
various, and yet everyone in Cambridge was aware that behind this garish
behaviour there was a real, a forcible and a big personality. His
performances chiefly expressed themselves in tricyclings and bathings,
in lectures on English history, which nobody attended, and in At-Homes
on Sunday evening, which everybody attended. He had a set of four rooms
(the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open to anybody, and
if you had said you wanted a bath in the middle of the party, O.B. would
certainly have said, “Ha, ha! awfully jolly,” have given you a sponge
and a towel and have come in to help. Next to that came his bedroom,
lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, with a bronze reproduction
of the Greek “Winged Sleep” over his bed; then, not a whit more public
than these apartments came two big sitting-rooms, in one of which was a
grand piano, and four small harmoniums of various tones, one flute-like,
one more brazen in quality, and two faintly resembling wheezy and unripe
violins. On these--each with its performer and a miniature score--O.B.
and Bobby, and Dicky and Tommy would execute some deliberate quartette,
or with the piano to keep them all moderately together would plunge with
gay, foolhardy courage into the Schumann quintette. Never was there a
more incredible sight (you could hardly believe you saw it) than that of
O.B. pedalling away at this Obeophone (for thus this curious harmonium
was aptly named) with his great body swaying to and fro and strange
crooning sounds coming out of his classical mouth to reinforce the
flutings of his melody, while Bobby and Dicky and Tommy, nimble-fingered
members of the Cambridge Musical Society, sat with brows corrugated by
their anxiety to keep in time with O.B. They never learned that they
were attempting an impossibility, but followed him faint yet pursuing as
he galloped along a few bars ahead, or suddenly slowed down so that they
shot in front of him. At the conclusion he would pat them all on the
back, and say, “Awfully jolly Brahms is, or was it Beethoven?” and
proceed to sing, “Funiculi, funicula” himself.... Groups formed and
reformed; here would be a couple of members of the secret and thoughtful
society known as “The Apostles” with white careworn faces, nibbling
biscuits and probably discussing the ethical limits of Determinism;
there the President of the Union playing noughts and crosses with a
Cricket Blue; there an assembly of daring young men who tore their
gowns, and took the board out of their caps, in order to present a more
libertine and Bohemian appearance, when they conversed with the young
lady in the tobacconist’s. Dons from King’s or other colleges fluttered
in and out like moths, and the room grew ever thicker with the smoke of
innumerable cigarettes. But O.B., however mixed and incongruous was the
gathering, never lost his own hospitable identity in the crowd; waving
bottles of curious hock he would spur on the pianist to fresh deeds of
violence, making some contribution to the discussion on Determinism, and
promise to speak at the next debate at the Union, as he wandered from
room to room, bald and stout and short yet imperial with his huge
Neronian head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. Age
could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he was a great joyous
ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for geniality, remarkable generosity and
kindliness, a good-humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had
cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as much stability
of purpose as a starling. His extraordinary vitality, his serene
imperviousness to hostility, his abandoned youthfulness were the
ingredients which made him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at
him, many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely remained the
most outstanding and prominent personality in Cambridge. Had he had a
little more wisdom to leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a
little more principled belief to give ballast to his friskiness, he
would have been as essentially great as he was superficially grotesque.
A small college as King’s then was, splits up into far more sharply
defined cliques than a large one, and it was not long before I found
myself firmly attached to a small group consisting in the main of
Etonians belonging either to King’s or Trinity. The younger fellows of
the college mixed very democratically with undergraduates of all years,
and the head of this vivid group was certainly Monty James, subsequently
Provost of King’s and now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the
finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, and Lionel Ford,
now headmaster of Harrow, both of them having lately taken their
degrees, were of the company, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working
for a degree in music, and a little later among junior members R. Carr
Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We were all members of the Pitt
Club, that delightful and unique institution where, to the end of your
life, once being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any
payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members of a literary
society called “The Chitchat,” in which on Saturday night each in
rotation entertained the society at his rooms with an original paper on
any subject as intellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup,
anchovy toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, for
physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went round too early, awful
reverberations of sneezing from the unaccustomed punctuated the
intellectual fare, and I remember (still with pain) reading a paper on
Marlowe’s _Faustus_, during which embarrassing explosions unnerved me. I
had reason to quote (at a very impressive stage of this essay) certain
lines from that tragedy, which with stage directions came out as
follows:
_Faustus._ Where are you damned? (_Sneezings._)
_Mephistopheles._ In Hell. (_Sneezings and loud laughter._)
For where I am is Hell (_Sneezing and more laughter_),
And where Hell is (_Uproar_) there must I ever be.
On another occasion a prominent philologist whose turn it was to regale
us, found that he had not had leisure to write his paper on “Manners”
and proposed to address us on the subject instead. He strode about the
room gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearthrug, lighting
cigarettes and throwing them away instead of his match, while he
harangued us on this interesting ethical topic, with interspersed
phrases of French and German, and odd English words like “cocksuredom.”
As this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled down on
“The Chitchat”; its decorous members bit their lips, and prudently
refrained from looking each other in the face, and there were little
stifled noises like hiccups or birds in bushes going about the room, and
the sofa where three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then
he diverged, _via_, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the ancient
Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a practical illustration to
throw himself into the attitude of Discobolus. At that precise moment,
Dr. Cunningham of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a
great deal, completely lost control of himself. Claret-cup spurted from
his nose and mouth; I should not have thought a man could have so
violently choked and laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to
himself. That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round the
entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. Cunningham, finding
he could not stop laughing at all, seized his cap and gown and left the
room with a rapid and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells
and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the open windows as
he crossed the court....
But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, when in rotation,
they dined in each other’s rooms. This institution (known as the
“T.A.F.” or “Twice a Fortnight”) had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen,
that brilliant and erratic genius, then in London, editing _The Mirror_
and astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two later returned to
Cambridge again, and, until his final and melancholy eclipse, diffused
over everyone who came across him the beam of his intellect and
personality. Of him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends
met, so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty James.
Intellectually (or perhaps æsthetically) I, like many others, made an
unconditional surrender to his tastes, and, with a strong prepossession
already in that direction, I became convinced for the time--and the time
was long--that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the keys of the
heavenly kingdom of literature. When dinner at the T.A.F. was over,
Monty James might be induced to read about the birthday-party of the
Kenwigses, with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed
up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter on the
reader’s part over Mr. Lillyvick’s glass of grog, cast it forth on to
the hearth-rug. He almost made me dethrone Bach from his legitimate
seat, and by a revolutionary movement place Handel there instead, so
magnificent were the effects produced, when with him playing the bass,
and me the treble from a pianoforte arrangement for two hands, we
thundered forth the “Occasional Overture.” He was a superb mimic, and at
the T.A.F. and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in which
the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridiculous yet. And when on
these Sunday evenings the Dickens reading, and the “Occasional
Overture,” and some singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F.
would go to O.B.’s “at home,” and mingle with inferior mortals.
Another society common to many members of the T.A.F. was the Decemviri
Debating Society. To this, some time during my undergraduate days, I was
elected, though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to belong to
it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, then as now, invariably
deprived me of coherent utterance, and a rich silence was all that I
felt capable of contributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never
attended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was that if
any member absented himself for a term (or was it two?) from the
debates, he should be deprived of the privileges of membership, I
received one day a notice of the next debate, at which there was private
business to be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion.
Unjustifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to flight, and
I was allowed to open another debate in the place of that already
arranged for, and to make a speech to show reason why I should not be
expelled. My motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a
meeting of the Decemviri again.
I suppose it must have been that belated year of voluntary reading at
Marlborough, which enabled me to win an exhibition at King’s at the end
of my first term; after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid
of all interest in classical subjects. There was not the smallest spur
to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or lecturers: if you
attended lectures and were duly marked off as present, you had conformed
to the rite, but nothing you heard could conceivably stimulate your
zeal. The classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we followed
Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War stood on a daïs at the end
of the lecture room, and indecently denuded his subject of any appeal to
interest. He put his head on one side and said, “Then came Sphacteria: I
don’t know what Sphodrias was about,” and so nobody knew what either
Sphodrias or Mr. X---- was about. He looked over exercises in Greek
prose as well: on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a
quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and received, for the only
time, his warm approval. A piece of Greek prose, according to academic
standards, appeared to be good, in proportion as it “brought in”
quotations and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo English
was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags and unusual words and
crabbed constructions from the most obscure passages were supposed to
constitute good Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta
student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee represented an example
of dignified English. To quote from that immortal and neglected work,
“Having said these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open
them again. He became _sotto voce_ for a few hours, and he went to God
about 6 p.m.” As this sublime death-bed scene appears to the ordinary
Englishman, so would the prose which Mr. X---- approved have appeared
to the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles.... But he had been Senior
Classic, and carried on the wonderful tradition, and in other respects
was classical tutor and an eager but inefficient whist-player. Nixon, an
equally traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar
Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. Any dawning of
love for classical language receded, as far as I was concerned, into
murk midnight again, and having temporarily justified my existence by
winning an exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year and a
half to follow more attractive studies. A year’s hard work on the
approved Baboo lines, I calculated, would be sufficient to secure
success in the Classical Tripos, which was the next event of any
importance.
Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually start a new University
magazine, which for wit and pungency is designed to eclipse all such
previous efforts, and I was no exception in the matter of this popular
gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as myself was
joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two or three years our senior,
and some B.A. whose name I cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly
drew the illustration on the cover of the _Cambridge Fortnightly_, which
represented a tremendous sun of culture rising behind King’s College
Chapel. O.B. contributed a poem to it, so also did my brother Arthur,
and Mr. Barry Pain sent us one of the best parodies in the language,
called “The Poets at Tea,” in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, Christina
Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously characteristic of
themselves. He also tried to galvanize the _Cambridge Fortnightly_ into
life by one or more admirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson
applied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant was clearly
stillborn, and considering the extreme feebleness of most of its organs,
I do not wonder that it was, after the lapse of a term or so, quite
despaired of. It had really never lived: it had merely appeared. My
share in the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was already
too busy writing _Sketches from Marlborough_, which was duly and
magnificently published within a year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be
told that I had better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform my
father of this literary adventure; then, when a local printer and
publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, undertook its production, I
thought he would consider it very odd that I had not told him of it
before and so I did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local
notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached him, and he
wrote me the most loving letter of remonstrance at my having kept it
from him. There was no word of blame for this amateur expenditure of
time and energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had
hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still felt that if he
had known I was working at it, he certainly would have suggested that I
might have been better occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I
knew to what entrancing occupation I had really determined to devote my
life, and though I might have made a better choice, I could not, my
choice being really made, have been better occupied than in practising
for it. The book in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it
professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part about it (of which
the omens have been amply fulfilled) being the extreme facility with
which it was produced.
Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom of cunning
artificers, and consecrated by the love of reverent hearts, none can
surpass and few can equal the glory of that holy and beautiful house
which the founder of King’s decreed for the worship of God, with its
jewelled windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. Half-way
up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak screen stretching from
side to side, on which stands the organ, a “huge house of sounds” with
walls of gilded pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels
with trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on Sunday
afternoons in the short days of winter would be nearly dark, but for the
soft glow of the innumerable wax candles with which the choir was lit,
flowing over the organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those
Sunday afternoon services, there would still be a little light outside,
though that would have faded altogether before service was over, and
just opposite where I sat was the window that I love best in all the
world. The Saviour has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress
of sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She had been weeping
and had heard behind her the question, “Woman, why weepest thou?” Her
bereaved heart had answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener
had said, “Mary.” It was then, in that window, that she knew him, and
turning, she bowed herself to the ground, with one hand stretched out to
him, and said, “Rabboni!” In the garden of the Resurrection He stood,
with the flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spikenard,
very precious, with which she had anointed them for his burial....
During the Psalms for the twenty-seventh evening of the month, when she
who sowed in tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark against
the faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candle-light spread
like a luminous fog to the cells of the vaulting above. At the end of
the service, the red curtain across the arch in the screen was drawn
back, and you peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the
night....
Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill of fare on the
chapel door would bring you, a little before anthem time, into the nave,
for Wesley’s “Wilderness” was soon to be sung. The choir, when service
was going on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but the
candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made visible the roof,
and the black silhouettes of the trumpeting angels on the organ. Then
the solo bass began: there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and
the treble solo and chorus of the flight of sorrow and sighing. Perhaps
you waited for the conclusion of inaudible prayers, on the chance that
Dr. Mann would play a Bach-fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain
had been drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries.
There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the gamba on the
swell started the melodious discussion, and its soliloquy provoked an
answer in the same words but with another voice. The duet “thickened and
broadened,” fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, and
gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one keyboard, silent as
yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. What the _gamba_ had stated, the
diapason now proclaimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered
from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, for what but the
_Tubas_ could so have imposed themselves and penetrated that immense and
melodious rioting of sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four
corners of the organ, “opened their mouths and drew in their breath,”
and spoke through their celestial trumpets.
* * * * *
It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology the infinity of
interests that interweaved themselves with these three undergraduate
years, and the reader must sympathetically partake of a _macedoine_ of
memories, that were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside
Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had the emotional
experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson double the part of Hermione and
Perdita in _The Winter’s Tale_, and fell violently in love with her.
Never surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, never did
another actress make such music of the tale of the flowers she had
gathered. No sculptor’s skill or whiteness of Pentelic marble ever
approached the glory of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of
joy I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving of lovely
arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was no statue any more but
the queen, living and moving again. I bought a photograph of her,
carried it about with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my
bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover it, for he would
not have cared much about this experience of mine. Not for nearly thirty
years later did I meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated
homage before her.
Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, as must needs be, of
lesser magnitude, now that new constellations directed my voyagings,
but, being granted an _exeat_ of two nights in order to witness the
opening of Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get
half a day at my school. Already the old order had changed; the values
were different, and even as I had once suspected, a few months had
sufficed to do that. Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed
and assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which was
imperishably part of my personality: my very identity would have been
something other than it was, had I not lived and grown up there. But
many ties which had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I saw
which were the closest of all, and they, just one or two of them, were
as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still merry-eyed behind the pince-nez
to which he had taken, and that of the friend who on the last day of
term had sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He absented
himself from an hour of morning-school, and met me, dishevelled with a
night journey, at the station. As we passed through the town we bought
rolls and sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, making
breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, and for that hour it
was as if the rind of the last months had been peeled off, and the old
friendship glowed like the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little
impression I had made on that shining shore was already washed by the
advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a little higher up the
beach, the sand-castles of others were growing tall and turreted under
vigorous spades....