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[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, FROM THE BACKS.]
THE BABE, B.A.
BEING THE UNEVENTFUL HISTORY OF
A YOUNG GENTLEMAN AT CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY
BY EDWARD F. BENSON
AUTHOR OF “DODO” “LIMITATIONS”
WITH SIX ILLUSTRATIONS
LONDON & NEW YORK G. P.
PUTNAM’S SONS 1897
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall_
DEDICATION.
_DEAR TOBY_:
_It is fitting, and I hope you will not feel it otherwise, that your
name should appear on the forefront of this little book, for you know
best how much good humour went to the making of it, and how when it
was read piecemeal, as it was written, to you, your native politeness,
which I cannot admire too much, more than once prompted you to laugh.
(Advt.) You will remember, too, when I first mentioned the idea of it
to you, that with some solemnity we procured a large sheet of foolscap
paper, and a blue pencil, and then and there set ourselves to put down
all the remarkable and stirring events which happened to us in those
four years we spent together at Cambridge; how we failed egregiously
to recollect anything remarkable or stirring--pardon me, we remembered
one stirring event, but decided not to treat the world to it--which
had come within our personal experience, and thereupon cast, or as you
said, “speired” about for any remarkable and stirring incident, which
had happened, not, alas, to us, but to anybody else soever. Here again
I may recall to you that we drew blank, and our sheet of paper was
still virgin white, our blue pencil as sharp as ever, and the book no
nearer conception than before._
_Then it was that the uncomfortable conviction dawned on us, gradually
illuminating our minds as some cloudy rain-slanted morning grows clear
to half-wakened eyes, that in the majority of cases, remarkable and
stirring events do not befall the undergraduate, and that if the book
was to be made at all, it must be made of homely, and I hope wholesome,
ingredients, a cricket ball, a canoe, a football, a tripos, a don, a
croquet mallet, a few undergraduates, a Greek play, some work, and so
forth. For it seemed to us that the superficial enquirer--and you, I
vow, are even more superficially-minded than I--finds that these things
are common to the experience of most men, but that when you begin to
deal in spiritualities, heroes, century-making captains of eleven,
chess blues, and higher aspirations, you desert the normal plane for
the super-normal, where people like you and me have no business to
intrude._
_So that, now it is complete, you will find therein neither births,
deaths, nor marriages, and though the =Babe= himself may have waxed
a little out of proportion to our original scheme--he ought, for
instance, never to have played Rugby for his University, as savouring
too much of the hero--I have retained for him to the end that futility
of mind, and girt him about with that flippant atmosphere, in which the
truly heroic chokes and stifles. About the other characters I have no
such confessions to make; they have successfully steered clear of all
distinctions, bodily or mental; I have even omitted to state =Ealing’s=
place in the tripos, and for this reason. He ought to have done better
than the =Babe=, but the =Babe= got a second, and this leaves only one
class where Ealing’s name would reasonably appear, and I altogether
refuse to let him take a first._
_Good-bye for the present: but you will be home for leave, will you
not, in a month?_
_Believe me, my dear Toby,
Ever your sincere friend,
E. F. BENSON._
_P. S.--I apologise for what I have said about your superficialness. It
is, however, perfectly true._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.--TO INTRODUCE 1
II.--IN FELLOWS’ BUILDINGS 14
III.--THE BABE 30
IV.--_vs._ BLACKHEATH 47
V.--THE WORK-CLUB 63
VI.--THE BABE’S PICNIC 76
VII.--THE BABE’S “SAPPING” 93
VIII.--CROQUET 111
IX.--TEA AT THE PITT 122
X.--ROYAL VISITORS 134
XI.--THE REHEARSAL 146
XII.--A COLLEGE SUNDAY 162
XIII.--KING’S CHAPEL 176
XIV.--A VARIETY ENTERTAINMENT 183
XV.--CLYTEMNESTRISMOS 198
XVI.--AFTER LUNCH 212
XVII.--A LITTLE GAME 223
XVIII.--THE CONFESSION 236
XIX.--IN THE FIFTIES 246
XX.--THE BABE’S MINOR DIVERSIONS 261
XXI.--A DAY IN THE LENT TERM 270
XXII.--BEFORE THE TRIPOS 283
XXIII.--THE LISTS 299
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ST. JOHN’S CHAPEL, FROM THE BACKS _Frontispiece._
TRINITY BRIDGE, FROM THE BACKS _Facing p. 76_
KINGS COLLEGE, SCREEN AND GATEWAY “ _p. 176_
KING’S PARADE AND CAIUS COLLEGE “ _p. 212_
THE BACKS “ _p. 111_
CLARE COLLEGE AND BRIDGE “ _p. 246_
THE BABE, B.A.
I.--TO INTRODUCE.
The time has come, the showman said,
To look at many things,
At Deans and tea and men and Babes
At Cambridge and at King’s.
LIGHT-BLUE LYRICS.
“And I maintain,” said Reggie, flourishing the Britannia-metal
teapot (in order, it is supposed, to lend a spurious emphasis to the
_banalité_ of his sentiment), “that it’s better to have played and lost
than never--”
The teapot--one of those in which the handle is invariably the hottest
part--had just been filled up with boiling water, and a clear and
fervid amber stream flew bounteously out of its spout on to the bare
knees of one of those who had played and lost. Thereupon a confused
noise arose, and Reggie’s sentence has never been finished.
After a short but violent interlude, the confused noise ceased by tacit
consent, as suddenly as it had begun; Ealing helped Reggie to pick up
the broken fragments that remained, and the latter had to drink his tea
out of a pint glass.
“To think that a mere game of football should lead to such disastrous
consequences,” he remarked. “Why does tea out of a glass taste like hot
Gregory powder?”
“I never drank hot Gregory powder; what does it taste like?”
“Why, like tea out of a glass,” said Reggie brilliantly.
“Reggie, if you want to rag again, you’ve only got to say so.”
Ealing threw into a corner the napkin with which he had been drying his
knees and stocking after the tea-deluge, and as he had finished, took
out a pipe, and proceeded to fill it.
“That pig of a half-back caught me a frightful hack on the shin,” he
said.
“Well, you kicked him in the stomach later on,” said Reggie
consolingly. “That’s always something to fall back on. Besides he did
it by accident, and it certainly looked as if you did it on purpose. Of
course it may only have been sheer clumsiness.”
“Dry up. You didn’t funk as much as usual this afternoon.”
“I tried to, but I never had time. And I can funk as quickly as any man
in England. Jack, it’s time for you to say something.”
Jack Marsden was the only one of the three who looked in the least like
a gentleman at that moment. Ealing and Reggie were both in change, they
both wore villainously muddy flannel knickerbockers, short enough to
disclose villainously muddy knees, old blazers, and strong, useful,
football boots with bars. Jack, who had taken no part in the confused
noise, was sitting in a low chair reading _Alice in Wonderland_, and
eating cake in the manner of a man who does not think about dinner.
“I wasn’t asleep,” he remarked. “I heard every word you fellows were
saying.”
“Dormouse,” explained Ealing.
“Dormouse it is. Give me some more tea, Reggie.”
“I call it so jolly sociable to read a book when you come to tea,”
remarked Reggie.
“So do I. Thanks. And another piece of cake.”
“Football’s a beastly game,” said Ealing.
“Especially when one is beaten. Here we are out of the Cup ties in the
first round, and what one is to do now I don’t know. I can’t think why
people ever play football.”
“I shall work,” said Ealing. “Have you seen the list of the subjects
for the Mays? I think it must be meant for a joke. They have set all
the classical authors I ever heard of, and nearly all I haven’t ever
heard of.”
“I want a clean cup,” quoted Jack.
“You want a clean--” began Reggie slowly in a tone of virulent
condemnation. But being unable to finish his sentence in an adequately
insulting manner, he left Jack’s deficiencies to the imagination.
“He wants a clean pipe,” remarked Ealing. “It sounds like a kettle
boiling.”
Jack shut up his book and yawned.
“You fellows are beastly funny,” he said. “I’m going back to Trinity to
work. For why? I am dining with the Babe to-night.”
“The Babe has got markedly madder and several years younger since last
term,” said Ealing. “And he was neither sane nor old to begin with.
Tell him so with my love. Or I dare say Reggie and I will come round
later.”
“Do. It is November the fifth. The Babe observes all feasts, whether
civil or ecclesiastical. He says it would be a thousand pities to let
these curious old customs lapse into disuse.”
“I wish the Babe wouldn’t use such beautiful language,” said Ealing.
“He only does it in his less lucid intervals. Good-bye. I’ll tell him
you’re coming round about ten.”
Jack picked up his hat and stick and went off to his rooms in Trinity,
where till half-past seven he drifted helplessly about like a
ship-wrecked mariner, to whom no sail breaks the limitless horizon,
in Thucydides’s graphic account of the Peloponnesian war. To Jack,
however, it appeared that its chief characteristic was its length,
rather than its interest, a criticism, the truth of which is rendered
more and more probable every year by an enormous mass of perfectly
independent, unbiassed critics. But being a short and stout young man,
by no means infirm of purpose, he regarded that merely as a reason the
more for beginning at once.
Reggie Bristow and Ealing sat on for an hour or so by the fire. They
were old friends, and so they did not need to talk much. Reggie was a
year the younger of the two, and he was now half-way through his first
term at King’s. They had been at Eton five years together, where they
had both extracted a good deal of amusement out of life, and perhaps
a little profit. They were both exceedingly healthy, to judge by the
superficial standards of examinations, rather stupid, and, in the
opinion of those who knew them, on a much more important matter, very
liveable-with. Furthermore, they both played games rather well, and,
as was right, neither of them ever troubled his head about abstract
questions of any sort or kind. Living was pleasant, and they proceeded
to live.
Reggie had been performing this precarious feat with admirable
steadiness for just nineteen years. Nature had gifted him with a
pleasant face, and a healthy appetite had enabled him to show it to
eminent advantage on the top of a tall body. He preferred talking to
working, cricket to football, and lying in bed to “signing in”
at 8 A.M. in the morning. He smoked a good many pipes every
day, and blew smoke rings creditably. He played the piano a little,
but his friends did not encourage him to take the necessary practice
whereby he might play it any better. He was in fact perfectly normal,
which is always the best thing to be.
“It’s a great bore, our being beaten,” he said, after a long pause,
during which he had succeeded in blowing one smoke ring through
another. “We were the best side really.”
“Of course we were, although we are blessed with a goal-keeper who
hides behind the goal-posts, until a man has had his shot.”
“He stopped rather a hot one to-day.”
“Purely by accident. He peeped out from the goal-post too soon, and
it struck him in the stomach. I hate being beaten by Pemmer, though
I shouldn’t have minded if we’d lost to Trinity. The ground was in a
filthy state too. One couldn’t get off.”
Reggie sighed.
“I’ve got to write to my father to-morrow,” he said, “and tell him my
impressions of Cambridge. It will be a little difficult, because I
haven’t got any.”
“Of course you haven’t. Only people in books have impressions. Describe
the match to-day.”
“I’m afraid it wouldn’t interest him.”
“Well, describe King’s Chapel.”
“I might do that; perhaps he’s forgotten what it is like. Oh, yes, and
I might describe some of the dons. I’m expected to be very earnest, you
know, and the worst of it is I don’t know how.”
“Do you suppose one will ever become a responsible being?” asked Ealing.
“No, never,” said Reggie emphatically. “I grow sillier and sillier
every day.”
“Well, you can’t get much sillier.”
Reggie shook his head.
“You wait a year or two,” he said. “I don’t suppose you can form the
slightest impression of how foolish I can be if I like.”
“What are you going to do when you go down?”
“The Lord knows,” said Reggie. “I was considered remarkably bright for
my age at one time.”
“Long ago?”
“Ages ago. I don’t suppose I’ve been considered bright for the last six
years. Oh, by the way, they’ve put me into the Pitt.”
“How very imprudent of them!”
“Yes. There was a young man in the Pitt.”
“Well?”
“That’s all. It’s me, you know.”
Ealing got up and stretched slowly and luxuriously.
“I must go and change. I believe one oughtn’t to sit in wet things. But
if one does it frequently enough, it doesn’t seem to hurt one, and the
same remark applies to muffins.”
“I shall try sitting in a muffin,” said Reggie thoughtfully. “I never
thought of it before.”
“Do. Are you going into Hall to-night?”
“Yes, unless you ask me to dinner.”
“I have no intention whatever of doing that,” said Ealing.
“Then we’ll both go into Hall. I propose to drink champagne out of a
silver mug to make up for the tea out of a glass.”
“‘Not what I wish but what I want,’ as the Babe said the other day when
he ordered six pairs of silk pyjamas.”
“Oh, the Babe has his points,” said Reggie.
Reggie’s rooms looked out on to a small court, bounded on two sides by
the new college buildings, on one by that pellucid river, from which,
as Wordsworth might have said, “Cambridge has borrowed its name,” and
on the other by four or five big elm-trees. Beyond these lay the back
lawn, growing a little rank just now with autumn rains, and above that
the main buildings of the college, and the Chapel, which is quite worth
describing even to the length of four sides of that smaller size of
note-paper, which is found so eminently convenient a basis for the
purpose of writing letters to relations.
His two rooms were on the third floor, opening the one into the other,
and like all college rooms, were very thoughtfully supplied with an
outer door which could only be opened from the inside, and by means of
which the laborious student can shut himself off from sight and sound
of the busy world around. During Reggie’s short stay at Cambridge it
had, as far as he knew, only been used once, and on that occasion a
playful friend, mistaking its real use, had shut him out, having
previously ascertained that he had lost the key. This feat has at least
the merit of simplicity, and it appears to lose none of its fascination
however constantly repeated.
Inside, they were furnished with a small bookcase, occupied by
débutant-looking classical books, several low chairs, which may best
be described as rather groggy, and had been taken on from the previous
owner at a high valuation, a piano of a harsh and astringent quality
of tone, but plenty of it, several high chairs, and two tables. The
smaller of these Reggie preferred to call his working table, the only
explanation of which seemed to lie in the fact that somebody often sat
on the edge of it when the chairs were full. Two or three school groups
and a couple of engravings hung on the walls, and the chimney-piece was
littered with things which reminded one of the delightfully vague word
“remnants,” and consisted of candlesticks, pipes, old letters, loose
matches, an ash tray, a clock which for the last month had been under
the delusion that it was always ten minutes to four, an invitation to
play in the Freshman’s football match, and another to see the Dean at
five minutes to seven, a watch and watch-chain, sixpence, a lawn-tennis
ball, a small wooden doll in hideous nakedness (no explanation
forthcoming), a pen, and a cigarette.
It was a cold evening, and Reggie wandered in and out of his bedroom,
in a state of betwixt and between, now clad only in a bath towel,
later on in a pair of trousers and socks, in the fulness of time
completely clothed. It still wanted five or ten minutes to seven, and
he stood in front of the fire warming himself till Hall time, feeling
in that deliciously half-tired, half-lazy mood which is the inimitable
result of violent exercise. He rummaged aimlessly in the débris on the
mantel-piece, and suffering the deserved fate of idle hands, found the
Dean’s note about which he had genuinely forgotten. He gave vent to a
resigned little sound, about half-way between a sigh and a swear, took
up his gown and left the room.
II.--IN FELLOWS’ BUILDINGS.
King, nine, twa, do you play them so?
Whae’s that a-calling?
I dinna ken, and I do not know
Whae’s that a-calling sae sweet.
ON THE BORDER.
And one clear call for me.
TENNYSON.
Those Fellows of colleges, who live in college are, for obvious
reasons, debarred from the matrimonial state, and should inspire
greater respect in reflective minds than almost any other class of
persons in this naughty world. For the most part they combine the
morality of married men with the innocence of ideal bachelors. Their
lives are for nine months or so of the year lived in the sequestered
shades of pious and ancient foundations, unspotted by the world. Those
who have relations fill their places in the domestic circle where
their absence has no doubt rendered them doubly dear, at Christmas and
Easter, or join those who have not, and pass their long vacation on the
lower slopes of the Alps, or at quiet little sea-side places; some of
them visit cathedrals during their unoccupied months, some the lakes,
few or none, London, or if London, chiefly the reading-room at the
British Museum. But there are exceptions to the most desirable rules,
and even among Fellows of colleges there are a few who are reported to
know “a thing or two.”
On Saturday night it often happened that Fellows of King’s asked their
colleagues from other colleges to dine with them. After dinner they
sat in the Combination Room for an hour or so, or they would break up
into parties, which spent the evening at one or other of the Fellows’
rooms, and indulged in the mild dissipation of whist at three-penny
points, which they seemed to find strangely exhilarating. One such
party adjourned directly after dinner to the room of the Dean, Mr.
Collins, who two hours before had remonstrated with Reggie for not
attending a larger percentage of early Chapels or their equivalent.
To undergraduates he was scholastic and austere, but among his own
contemporaries he not infrequently relaxed into positive playfulness.
Mr. Stewart, a history tutor from Trinity, was one of his guests
to-night, and Mr. Longridge, a Dean of the same college, another.
About Mr. Longridge, all that need be said at present is that in body
he was insignificant, and in mind, incoherent. But Mr. Stewart was a
more conspicuous person both bodily and mentally: he was in fact one of
the exceptions to the general run of his class, and he was credited,
by report at least, with knowing not only a thing or two, but lots of
things.
Just now, his long, languid form, attired altogether elegantly, was
spread over a considerable area of arm-chair, his feet rested on the
fender, and he was holding forth on certain subjects of the day, about
which he was perfectly qualified to speak. The man with the incoherent
mind was sitting near him, listening with ill-concealed impatience to
his sonorous periods, and getting in a word edgewise occasionally. Mr.
Collins was busy attending to the wants of his guests, and two of
his friends from the same college, were sitting together on the sofa,
resigned but replete.
“The luxury of modern times,” Mr. Stewart was saying, “is
disgusting,--Chartreuse, please--simply disgusting. What business have
men to clothe their floors in fabrics from Persia, their walls in other
fabrics from Cairo and Algiers, or stamped leather, and paintings by
Turner and Reynolds and, and Orchardson, their lamp-shades in lace and
Liberty fabrics--Lace and Liberty sounds like a party catch-word--and
leave their minds naked and unashamed? I myself aim at a studious
simplicity--Thank you, I have brought my own cigarettes. Won’t you have
one? They are straight from Constantinople--a studious simplicity. I
live at Cambridge, while my natural sphere is London and Paris. I get
up at seven, while nature bids me stay in bed till ten. I--”
Mr. Longridge could not bear it any longer. He sprang out of his chair
as a cuckoo flies out of a cuckoo clock on the stroke of the hour, and
adjusted his spectacles.
“Well, take the case of a man who, say, lived at Oxford. Supposing--or
well, take another case--”
Mr. Stewart took advantage of a momentary pause to continue.
“Yes, of course, very interesting,” he said. “A delightful town,
Oxford. A shadow of the romance of mediævalism still lingers about its
grey streets, which is quite absent from the new red-brick buildings
of St. John’s College, Cambridge. I remember walking there one morning
with dear George Meredith, and your mention of Oxford recalled to me
what he said. Poor dear fellow! He is the most lucid of men, but as
soon as he puts pen to paper he is like an elephant that is lost in a
jungle, and goes trumpeting and trampling along through wreaths and
tangled festoons of an exotic style. Lord Granchester was staying there
at the time--Sir Reginald Bristow he was then--”
“I had the pleasure of speaking to his son just before Hall,” remarked
Mr. Stewart in professional accents.
“Reggie, is dear Reggie up here? How delightful! I remember him six or
seven years ago. He was like one of Raphael’s angels.”
“What-was-it-that-George-Meredith-said?” asked the incoherent man, all
in one word.
“One of Raphael’s angels,” pursued Mr. Stewart, taking not the
slightest notice. “A face like an opening flower.”
“The flower has a stem six feet high now,” remarked Mr. Collins.
“Dear Reggie! And--and is he as fascinating as ever?”
Mr. Collins laughed.
“I have not known him long, so I cannot say how fascinating he is
capable of being. And as a rule Deans and undergraduates don’t put out
their full power of fascination in dealing with each other.”
“But whose fault is that?” said Mr. Stewart in a slow unctuous
voice. “Surely we ought to be brothers, dear elder brothers to the
undergraduates. I remember--”
Mr. Collins, who was obviously sceptical about George Meredith’s
remark, and hoped that Stewart was going back to it, brightened up and
interrogated, “Yes?” in an intelligent manner.
“I remember,” said Mr. Stewart still sublimely oblivious, “I remember
that I myself used always to make friends, dear friends of the
undergraduates when I was Dean. If one of them did not attend Chapel
often enough, as often, that is, as our odious regulations require, I
used to ask him to call for me on his way, and we used to go to Chapel
together. One had a rich, lovely tenor voice. I--I forget his name, and
I think he is dead.”
Mr. Longridge laughed monosyllabically but unkindly.
“It was very pleasant, very pleasant indeed, but to be Dean brings one
into the wrong relation with undergraduates,” said Mr. Stewart. “And
talking of music, I had a charming time at Bayreuth last year. We had
_Parsifal_ and _Tannhäuser_ and the _Meistersingers_. _Tannhäuser_ is
the most wonderful creation. Like all of us, but more successfully
than most, Wagner welds into one harmonious whole, the ugliness of sin
and the beauty of holiness.”
Mr. Longridge--there is no other word--bridled.
“The beauty of holiness,” continued Mr. Stewart, chewing and
masticating his words, so as to get the full flavour out of them,
“a human soul capable of anything. Venusberg and Rome are alike
interludes to him. He goes on his sublimely humorous way from Venusberg
to Elizabeth, from Elizabeth to Venusberg, and neither produces any
lasting effect. And how supremely natural the end is! He has left an
almond rod at Rome, and because one of the pilgrims, one of a dowdy
crew of middle-class pilgrims shows him an almond rod in blossom,
he rushes to the conclusion that it is his. How illogical, but how
natural! And he who has never had the courage of his opinions either
at Venusberg or Rome, is ‘struck of a heap,’ as they say in suburban
places, by the flowering almond rod, and instantly gives up the ghost.
Maskelyne and Cooke could produce a bundle of flowering almond rods in
half the time. We pay five shillings to see them all. Tannhäuser paid
his life to see one. He died of joy at the sight of that flowering
almond rod. And after all it was only artificial flowers twined round a
stick.”
“Well, of course, if you choose to look at it in that way,” ejaculated
Mr. Longridge.
“My dear Longridge,” said Mr. Stewart very slowly, “there is only one
way to look at things, only one way.”
“Not at all, though you might very fairly say that there was only one
man to look at in one way. _Quot homines, tot sententiæ._”
“Dear old Longridge,” said Stewart with unctuous affection.
“You might just as well say,” continued Mr. Longridge, “that because
there are people who are colour-blind, we none of us know green from
red.”
There was perhaps nothing in the world which Mr. Longridge enjoyed
so heartily as what he called a good, sharp argument. This usually
consisted in his putting forward a great quantity of indefensible
and irrelevant propositions himself, and then proceeding to show how
indefensible they were: their irrelevancy needed no demonstration. He
was a man of mixed mind.
“Dear old Longridge,” repeated Stewart. “Some people have the
misfortune to be born colour-blind, and no doubt in the next world they
will be extraordinarily keen-sighted. But until we have finished with
this world, and I have not, we can leave colour-blind people altogether
out of the question, can we not? In fact, I don’t know how they found
their way in. Some things are green, others red, and if you call them
by their wrong names, even your own friends must allow that you are no
judge of colour.”
Mr. Longridge who was very near-sighted, seemed disposed to take this
personally.
“But because I differ from you, _in toto_ I may say, that is no proof
that I am colour-blind. You might just as well say--well, to take
another instance--”
“To take another instance,” said Mr. Stewart, “because you are sleepy,
that is no reason why I should go to bed. In fact, I will have just
a glass more of Chartreuse. What a lovely colour it is. A decadent,
abnormal colour, the colour of a spoiled piece of soul-fabric. Yes,
quite delicious. I spent a fortnight once in the monastery at Fécamp,
full of dear, delightful, ascetic monks. I think they all put boiled
peas in their shoes during the day, which must be horribly squashy,
but they all drink Chartreuse after dinner, so they end happily. Dear,
impossible Charles Kingsley used always to abuse monks--I suppose
because he was tinged with asceticism himself. But I fancy there is
no real objection to their marrying. Monks marry nuns, I think. How
delightful to receive an invitation card--‘Monk and Nun Stewart.’”
The two other Fellows of King’s had subsided into the background
altogether, and were discussing the chances of their various pupils
in the next tripos. They had both refused Chartreuse, and took their
coffee in a mixture of half and half with hot milk. The integral
calculus on one side balanced an exceptional skill at Greek Iambics on
the other, and they prattled on politely and innocently. It must be
conceded that they felt but little interest in what they were talking
about, but their interest on all subjects was diminutive and bird-like.
They pecked and hopped away.
“But he showed me a copy of Iambics the other day,” said one, “with two
final Cretics in it.”
Mr. Stewart caught the last words.
“What an epigram that ought to make!” he said, smiling broadly and
benignly. “The insidious and final Cretic. I see him as a lean, spare
man, with a cast in his eye.”
“It’s merely a false foot in Greek Iambics they are talking of,” said
Longridge breathlessly.
“And a false foot,” continued Stewart, “cunningly concealed by patent
leather boots. Thank you, Longridge, the picture is complete. And I
have a Victor Hugo class in my room at half-past ten. We are reading
_Les Misérables_--a--a prose epic. I must literally be going.”
“I should like to see a figurative going,” said Mr. Longridge,
spitefully.
Mr. Stewart turned on him with mild forbearance.
“You can say you must be going and then stop,” he said. “Good night,
good night. A most pleasant evening.”
There were now only four of them, so at their host’s proposal they
settled down to whist. Mr. Longridge enquired eagerly whether it was
to be long whist or short whist, but as no one had ever heard of
either, it is to be presumed that they played medium, and it is certain
they played mediocre whist. Mr. Longridge during the first deal,
demonstrated quite conclusively that whist markers could be used either
for whist or backgammon or bézique, always supposing you knew how to
multiply by ten, or with somewhat less ease for registering the votes
in the present election. This latter, however, appeared, as far as it
was possible to follow him, to imply a knowledge of how to multiply
by thirteen and divide by twenty-nine, a feat which all his hearers,
with the exception of the mathematician, were hopelessly incapable of
performing. This, however, was no detraction whatever from the abstract
value of such a discovery.
Longridge was partner to Mr. Campbell, one of the hitherto silent
guests, and Collins to Currey, who was cursed with the final Cretic
pupil. And herein lay the sting of the affair, for Longridge’s studies
in whist had got as far as the call for trumps, while his partner’s
knowledge was confined to a complete acquaintance with the ordinal
value of individual cards. Collins, however, was a sound player,
and the only one present, excepting Longridge, who knew what a call
for trumps meant. Longridge consequently stripped his hand naked,
as it were, for the sole benefit of his adversary. The rest were as
Teiresias, struck blind by the sight of five trumps unveiled.
With his habitual acumen the Dean of Trinity perceived this during
the second rubber, and without communicating his discovery, as he was
strongly tempted to do, played the higher of two cards instead of the
lower so persistently in the first round, in order to deceive his
adversary on the right, that before the game was three deals old he
had irrevocably revoked. Holding the knave and nine of clubs he played
the higher of the two on to the queen third hand, and deceived by his
own acuteness supposed he had no more, and trumped the second round.
Whereby his adversaries went out, a treble.
* * * * *
Reggie and Ealing, meantime, had spent a charming evening. Reggie had
been pressed not to play the piano after Hall, and, instead, they had
played billiards till just before ten, and then gone round to Malcolm
Street to come down to dessert at the Babe’s dinner party.
As it was Guy Fawkes’s day, their course, so to speak, was mapped out
for them beyond possibility of error, and Reggie had the prospect of
being exactly six shillings and eight-pence poorer than he otherwise
would have been, at about 10.30 on Monday morning.
III.--THE BABE.
O bitter world, where one who longs
To be recorded unforgiven,
Bewitched and wild, is called a child
Fit to be seen in any heaven.
HOTCHPOTCH VERSES.
The Babe was a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played
the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously
of the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the
hopeless respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner
parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of
the duties of half-back at Rugby football. His dinner parties were
selected with the utmost carelessness, his usual plan being to ask the
first five people he met, provided he did not know them too intimately.
With a wig of fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingénue dress, he
was the image of Vesta Collins, and that graceful young lady might
have practised before him, as before a mirror. But far the most
remarkable point about the Babe, considering his outward appearance and
other tastes, was his brilliance as a Rugby football player. He was
extraordinarily quick with the ball, his passing was like a beautiful
dream, and he dodged, as was universally known, like the devil. It was
a sight for sore eyes to see the seraphic, smooth-faced Babe waltzing
gaily about among rough-bearded barbarians, pretending to pass and
doing nothing of the kind, dropping neatly out of what looked like the
middle of the scrimmage, or flickering about in a crowd which seemed to
be unable to touch him with a finger.
Last night the Babe had been completely in his element. His dinner
party consisted of a rowing-blue, a man who had been sent down from
Oxford, a Dean who was to preach the University sermon next day, and
was the Babe’s uncle, Jack Marsden, a gentleman from Corpus, who had
a very rosy chance, so said his friends, of representing Cambridge
against Oxford at chess, and himself. Later on, Reggie and Ealing had
come in, who with the help of the rowing man broke both his sofas;
the gentleman from Oxford had insisted, to the obvious discomfort of
the Dean, on talking to him about predestination, a subject of which
the Dean seemed to know nothing whatever; the chess-man had played
bézique with Jack, and the Babe had presided over them all with
infantine cynicism. A little later on, when the Dean had gone away, he
had danced a skirt-dance in a sheet and a night-gown, and they ended
up the evening by what the Babe called “a set piece” from his window,
consisting of a catherine wheel, and four Roman candles, not counting
the rocket which exploded backwards through the Babe’s chandelier,
narrowly missing the head of the man from Corpus, whose chance of
getting his chess-blue would, if it had hit, have been totally
extinguished. In order to lend verisimilitude to the proceedings Reggie
had gone into the street and called “Oh-h-h-h,” at intervals, and as he
had left his cap and gown in the Babe’s room, he was very promptly and
properly proctorised.
The Babe breakfasted next morning at the civilised hour of ten, and
observed with a faint smile that the rocket stick was deeply imbedded
in the ceiling, and he ate his eggs and bacon with a serene sense of
the successful incongruity of his little party the night before. The
gentleman from Oxford who was staying with him had not yet appeared,
but the Babe waited for no man, when he was hungry.
The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his
accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations from
the Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli’s
Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken
sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of the Yellow Book, which
the Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since
the former artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side
with Butler’s _Analogies_, Mr. Sponge’s _Sporting Tour_, and Miss Marie
Corelli’s _Barabbas_. It is, however, only fair to the Babe to say
that Bishop Butler’s volume had been part of the “set piece” for his
Littlego, and that he referred to Miss Corelli as the arch humourist
of English literature. A pair of dumb-bells, each weighing fifty-six
pounds, stood by the fireplace, but these the Babe had never been known
to use in order to further his muscular development; he only rolled
them over the floor with the patient look of one who had the destinies
of the world on his shoulders, whenever the lodger below played the
piano. It may be remarked that the two were not on speaking terms.
“And herein,” said the Babe, when he explained the use of the
dumb-bells the evening before, “herein lies half the bitterness of
human life.”
He was pressed to explain further, but only replied sadly,
“So near and yet so far,” and showed how it was possible to imitate the
experience of a sea-sick passenger on the channel, by means of “that
simple, and I may add, delicious fruit, the common orange.”
It was a most realistic and spirited performance, and all that the Dean
could do was to ejaculate feebly, “Do stop, Babe,” between his spasms
of laughter.
The Babe had finished his breakfast, which he ate with a good appetite,
heartily, before the gentleman from Oxford appeared, and proceeded
to skim the _Sunday Times_. When he did appear he looked a little
disconsolately at the breakfast table, and lifting up a dish-cover
found some cold bacon, at which he blanched visibly, and demanded soda
water.
“What did you eat for breakfast, Babe?” he asked.
The Babe looked up apologetically.
“I’m afraid I ate all the eggs, and the bacon must be cold by now,” he
said. “But I’ll send for some more.”
“No thanks. Where’s the tea?”
The Babe rang the bell.
“It’ll be here in a moment. I drank cocoa.”
Leamington finished his soda water, and sat down.
“There is no end to your greatness. Cocoa! Great Scot! My tongue is the
colour of mortar.”
“I’m so sorry. I feel quite well, thanks. Will you have some Eno’s
fruit salts? I know my landlady’s got some, because she offered me them
the other day when I had a cold. Here’s your tea. Do you ever read the
Pink ’un? It’s funny without being prudish.”
Leamington poured out some tea.
“Don’t read, Babe; it’s unsociable. Talk to me while I eat.”
The Babe put down the current copy of the _Sunday Times_, and laid
himself out to be pleasant.
“There are some people coming to lunch at two,” he said. “I rather
think I asked Reggie. Poor Reggie, he got dropped on in a minute by the
Proggins. Oh, yes, and so is Stewart. Do you know Stewart? He’s a don
at Trinity, and is supposed to be wicked. I wish someone would suppose
me to be wicked. But I’m beginning to be afraid they never will.”
“You must lose your look of injured innocence or rather cultivate the
injury at the expense of the innocence. Grow a moustache; no one looks
battered and world-weary without a moustache.”
“I can’t. I bought some Allen’s Hair Restorer the other day, but it
only smarted. I wonder if they made a mistake and gave me Allen’s
Antifat?”
“You don’t look as if they had,” said Leamington, “at least it doesn’t
look as if it had had much effect. Wouldn’t it take?”
“Not a bit,” said the Babe. “I applied it night and morning to my upper
lip, and it only smelt and smarted. I suppose you can’t restore a thing
that has never existed. I think I shall be a clergyman, because all
clergymen cut their moustaches off, and to do that you must have one.”
“I see. But isn’t that rather elaborate?”
“No means are elaborate if you desire the end enough,” said the Babe
sententiously. “I shall marry too, because married people are bald, and
I’m sure I don’t wonder.”
“So are babies.”
“Not in the same way, and don’t be personal. I can’t think of any
other means of losing the appearance of innocence. Suggest some: you’ve
been rusticated.”
“Why don’t you--”
“I’ve tried that, and it’s no use.”
“But you don’t know what I was going to say,” objected Leamington.
“I know I don’t. But I’ve tried it,” said the wicked Babe. “I’ve even
read the Yellow Book through from cover to cover, and as you see,
framed the pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. The Yellow Book is said to
add twenty years per volume to any one’s life. Not at all. It has left
me precisely where it found me, whereas, according to that, as I’ve
read five volumes, I ought to be, let’s see--five times twenty, plus
twenty--a hundred and twenty. I don’t look it, you know. It’s no use
your telling me I do, because I don’t. I have no illusions whatever
about the matter.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you anything of the kind,” said Leamington.
“But you should take yourself more seriously. I believe that is very
aging.”
The Babe opened his eyes in the wildest astonishment.
“Why I take myself like Gospels and Epistles,” he said. “The fault is
that no one else takes me seriously. You would hardly believe,” he
continued with some warmth, “that the other night I was proctorised,
and that when the Proctor saw who I was--he’s a Trinity man--he
said, ‘Oh, it’s only you. Go home at once, Babe.’ It is perfectly
disheartening. I offered to let him search me to see whether I had
such a thing as a cap or a gown concealed anywhere about me. And the
bull-dogs grinned. How can I be a devil of a fellow, if I’m treated
like that?”
“I should have thought a Rugby blue could have insisted on being
treated properly.”
“No, that’s all part of the joke,” shrieked the infuriated Babe. “It’s
supposed to add a relish to the silly pointless joke of treating me
like a child and calling me ‘Babe.’ I’ve never been called anything but
Babe since I can remember. And when I try to be proctorised the very
bull-dogs come about me, making mouths at me.”
“Rough luck. Try it on again.”
“It’s a pure waste of time,” said the Babe disconsolately. “I might
go out for a drive with all the bed-makers of this college in a
tandem, and no one would take the slightest notice of me. Besides I
can never make a tandem go straight. The leader always turns round
and winks at me. It knows perfectly well that I’m only the Babe,
bless its heart. I edited a perfectly scandalous magazine here last
term you know, every day during the May week. It simply teemed with
scurrilous suggestiveness. It insulted directly every one with whom I
was acquainted, and many people with whom I was not. It compared the
Vice-Chancellor to an old toothbrush, and drew a trenchant parallel
between the Proctors and the town drainage. It suggested that the
antechapel of King’s should be turned into a shooting-gallery, and
the side chapels into billiard-rooms. It proposed that I should be
appointed Master of Magdalen, I forget why at this moment. It contained
the results of a _plébiscite_ as to who should be Vice-Chancellor for
the next year, and the under-porter of King’s got in easily, with Jack
Marsden as a bad second. It proposed the substitution of dominoes and
hopscotch--I haven’t the least idea what hopscotch is, but it sounds
to me simply obscene--for the inter-university contests at cricket and
rowing. And that magazine,” said the Babe dramatically, rising from his
chair, and addressing Primavera, “that magazine was welcomed, welcomed,
Madam, by all classes. The innocent lambs, whose reputation I ought
to have ruined came bleating after me and said how they had enjoyed
it. It sold by hundreds, when it ought to have been suppressed: people
thought it funny, whereas it was only hopelessly foolish and vulgar,
though I say it who shouldn’t; while those few people who had the sense
to see how despicable the whole production really was, told each other
that ‘it was only Me.’ Me! I’m almost sick of the word. I was put ‘in
Authority’ in the Granta, when I ought to have been sent down--The
Vice-Chancellor asked me to dinner on the very day when I published
a most infernal and libellous lampoon about him, and I have already
told you how the Proctors treat me. It is enough,” said the Babe in
conclusion, “to make one take the veil, I mean the tonsure, and dry up
the milk of human kindness within one.”
“Hear, hear,” shouted Leamington. “Good old Babe.”
The Babe glared at him a moment, with wide, indignant eyes and then
went on rather shrilly:
“Look at Reggie. I’m older than he is, at least I think so, and any one
with a grain of sense would say that I therefore ought to know better,
and what is excusable in him, is not excusable in me, but he goes and
says ‘Oh’ in the street and he is treated as a dangerous character,
sent home, and will be fined. I might say ‘Oh’ till Oscar Browning got
into Parliament, and do you suppose they would ever consider me a
dangerous character? Not they. (Here the Babe laughed in a hollow and
scornful manner.) They would treat me with that infernal familiarity
which I so deprecate, and say, ‘Go home, Babe.’ Babe indeed!”
The Babe’s voice broke, and he flung himself into his chair after the
manner of Sarah Bernhardt, and hissed out “_Misérables! Comme je les
déteste!_”
Leamington applauded this histrionic effort, and feeling a little
better after breakfast, lit a cigarette. The maidservant came to clear
breakfast away, and as she left the room the Babe resumed in the
gentle, melancholy tones, which were natural to him:
“If I thought it would do any good, I would go and snatch a kiss from
that horrid, rat-faced girl as she is carrying the tray down stairs.
But it wouldn’t, you know; it wouldn’t do any good at all. She wouldn’t
complain to the landlady, or if she did it would only end in my giving
her half-a-crown. Besides, I don’t in the least want to kiss her--I
wouldn’t do it if she gave me half-a-crown. I wonder what George Moore
would do if he were me. We’ll ask Stewart when he comes to lunch. He is
intimate with all notable people. George Moore is notable isn’t he? I
fancy W. H. Smith & Son boycotted him. Stewart said the other day that
the Emperor of Germany was one of the nicest emperors he had ever seen.”
“That’s nothing,” said Leamington. “There’s a don at Oxford who
has written a book called _Princes I have Persecuted without
Encouragement_.”
The Babe laughed.
“A companion volume to Stewart’s _Monarchs I have Met_. Not that he has
written such a book. Stewart is perfectly charming, but he thinks a lot
of a Prince. If he hasn’t written _Monarchs I have Met_, he ought to
have.”
“We all ought to have done a lot of things we haven’t done,” said
Leamington.
“We had a butler once,” said the Babe, “who never would say the
General Confession, because he said he hadn’t left undone the things he
ought to have done, and it went against his conscience to say he had.
He got the sack soon after for leaving the door of the cellar undone,
and for getting drunk.”
“So he was undone himself.”
“When I grow up,” said the Babe with less bitterness, but returning
like a burned moth to the sore subject--no charge for mixed
metaphors--“I shall live exclusively in the society of archdeacons.
Perhaps they might think me wicked. Yet I don’t know--my uncle whom you
met last night thinks I’m such a good boy, and he’s a dean.”
“I doubt if they would. The other day some one sent a telegram to the
Archdeacon of Basingstoke, a man of whom he knew nothing except that he
was a teetotaller and an anti-vivisectionist, saying, ‘Fly at once, all
is discovered.’ The Archdeacon flew, and has never been heard of since.
No one has the slightest idea where he has gone or what he had done.
You know you wouldn’t fly, Babe, if you were sent telegrams like that
by the hundred.”
“How little you know me,” said the Babe dramatically. “I should fly
like fun. Don’t you see if one flew, one’s character for wickedness
would be established beyond all doubt. I might send a telegram to
myself, telling me to fly. Then I should fly, but leave the telegram
lying about in a conspicuous position. After a year’s absence I should
return, but my character would be gone beyond all hopes of recovery,
and the world would do me justice at last.”
“Poor misunderstood Babe! Why don’t you go to Oxford, saying you’ve
been sent down from Cambridge? What time do we lunch?”
“Oh, about two, and it’s half-past twelve already. Let’s go round to
the Pitt. This evening we will go to Trinity Chapel. A little walk is
very wholesome after breakfast. Besides I shall go in a bowler, and
perhaps we shall meet at Proggins. I shall insult him if we do.”
IV.--_VS._ BLACKHEATH.
For he was very fast,
And he ran and he passed,
And the sun and the moon and the stars
Tried to catch him by the tail,
But they one and all did fail,
And Venus broke her nose ’gainst Mars.
HOTCHPOTCH VERSES.