to begin work again at half-past twelve. Reggie finished underlining
his note, the point of which he could not quite understand, and so put
a query in the margin, and Ealing went back to the word he was looking
out in _Liddell & Scott_, an hour and a quarter before.
Ten minutes later Reggie observed that the Babe had forgotten his
cover-coat, which was lying on a chair, and they debated with some heat
whether it had better be taken to him at once. Eventually they tossed
up, as to who should do it; Ealing lost the toss, and they both jumped
up with alacrity.
“It’s a beastly nuisance when one has just settled down to work again,”
he said.
“I won,” remarked Reggie, “and I am going. By Jove, there’s that
Varsity clock striking a quarter to one. Here, let’s both go. It’s
no use working for a quarter of an hour. One can’t do anything in a
quarter of an hour, and I must lunch at one, as I’m playing footer.”
“All right. Of course we work after tea for two hours more as we
settled. That will make five, and one more after Hall.”
“And six hours steady work a day,” said Reggie cheerfully, “is as much
as is good for any man. I begin not to attend after I have worked,
really worked, you know, for six hours.”
VI.--THE BABE’S PICNIC.
Row, brothers, row,
The stream runs slow,
_We don’t know how to row_
_And the oars stick so._
LIGHT-BLUE LYRICS.
The Babe was no waterman, and he never pretended to be, but this did
not prevent his getting up a quiet picnic on the upper river one
delightful afternoon towards the end of May. There were only to be four
of them, not counting Mr. Sykes--though it was impossible not to count
Mr. Sykes, the others being Reggie, Ealing, and Jack Marsden.
Marsden, who had once, when a Freshman, been coached on the river, by
an angry man in shorts, and had been abandoned as hopeless after his
first trial, was naturally supposed by the Babe to be an accomplished
oarsman, and to have probed to its depths the nature of boats and
oars and stretchers, so he was deputed to find a boat which held four
people, several hampers, and a dog, and
[Illustration: TRINITY BRIDGE, FROM THE BACKS.]
which was warranted not to shy or bolt, and to be quiet with children.
It was understood that the Babe was not going to row or steer, his
office being merely to provide food for them all, and if possible
to prevent Mr. Sykes from leaping overboard when they passed the
bathing-sheds, and biting indiscriminately at the bathers, whom
for some reason of his own he regarded with peculiar but perfectly
ineradicable disfavour. The Babe had taken him up the river only the
week before, but opposite the town sheds Sykes had been unable to
restrain himself, had jumped off the boat into the water and chased to
land a bland and timid shopkeeper, to whom the Babe owed money, so it
looked as if it was a put-up job; the man had regained the steps of the
bathing-shed only just in time to save himself from being pinned in the
calf of the leg.
The Babe and Jack were to start from the raft by Trinity at three, and
pick up Reggie and Ealing opposite King’s. They were then to row up to
Byron’s Pool (so-called because there is no reason to suppose that
Byron was not extremely fond of it,) bathe and have tea, and afterwards
go a mile or so farther, and have dinner. The Babe who just now was
gated at ten, confidently hoped to be home at or before that hour, on
the sole ground that Napoleon had once said there was no such word as
impossible.
They paddled quietly up to the Mill just above the town, and here it
was necessary to haul the boat over the bank separating the upper
river from the lower. The Babe who was beautifully dressed in white
flannels, yellow boots, and a straw hat with a new riband, courteously
declined giving the smallest assistance to the others, but watched the
operation with interest and apparent approval, in consequence of which
he was advised by Reggie, who had got hot and rather dirty with his
exertions, to drop that infernally patronising attitude. Here too Mr.
Sykes first sniffed the prey, for he had caught sight of the bathers at
the town sheds across the fields, and was trotting quietly off in their
direction, secretly licking his lips, but outwardly pretending that he
was merely going for a little airy walk on his own account. The Babe
had to run after him and haul him back, for he affected to hear neither
whistling nor shouting, and on his return he kept smelling suspiciously
at the legs of casual passers-by as if he rather suspected that they
were going to bathe too.
Though the lower river is one of the foulest streams on the face of the
earth, the upper river is one of the fairest. It wanders up between
fresh green fields, bordered by tall yellow flags, loosestrife, and
creamy meadow-sweet, all unconscious of the fate that awaits it from
vile man below. Pollarded willows lean over the bank and listen to
the wind, and here and there a company of white poplars, the most
distinguished of trees, come trooping down to the water’s edge. The
stream itself carpeted with waving weeds strolls along clear and green
from the reflection of the trees, troops of bleak poise and dart in
the shallows, or shelter in the subaqueous forests, and the Babe said
he saw a trout, a statement to which no importance whatever need be
attached. Looking back across a mile of fields you see the pinnacles
of King’s rise grey and grave into the sky; and in front, Granchester,
with its old-fashioned garden-cradled houses, presided over by a church
tower on the top of which, as a surveyor once remarked, there is a plus
sign which is useful as a fixed point, nestles in a green windless
hollow.
But Bill, like Gallio, cared for none of those things. He knew
perfectly well that they were going to pass the town bathing-place
very shortly, and after half a mile or so more of uninteresting river,
the University bathing-place. The Babe had taken him up here once when
he had bathed himself, and though Mr. Sykes realised that he must not
bite his master, whatever foolish and ungentlemanly thing he chose to
do, he was very cold and reserved to him afterwards. But he meant to
behave exactly as he pleased at the town bathing-place, and a hundred
yards before they got there, he was standing in the bow of the boat,
uttering short malignant growls. The Babe, however, pulled him back by
the tail, and muffled him up in four towels, and Mr. Sykes rolled about
the bottom of the boat, and from within the towels came sounds of deep
dissatisfaction just as if there were a discontented bull-pup in the
middle of them.
Beyond the town bathing-place stands a detached garden, with bright
flower-beds cut out in a lawn of short green turf. Here the Babe
conceived a violent desire to land and have tea, which he was not
permitted to do; and above that runs a stretch of river, very properly
known as Paradise, seeing which the Babe had a fit of rusticity and
said he would go no farther, but live evermore under the trees with Mr.
Sykes, and grow a honey-coloured beard. He would encamp under the open
sky, and on fine afternoons would be seen sitting on the river bank
dabbling his feet in the water, and playing on a rustic pipe made of
reeds. He would keep a hen and a cow and a bed of strawberries, and it
should be always a summer afternoon. Indeed, had not a water-rat been
seen at the moment, which compelled him to throw Mr. Sykes overboard to
see whether he could catch it,--which he could not--there is no knowing
what developments this rustic phase would have undergone. So they went
slowly on, making a small detour up to the Granchester Mill, where the
water came hurrying out cool and foamy, and where the Babe asked an
elderly man, who was fishing intently on the bank, whether he had had
any bites, which seemed to infuriate him strangely, for he was fishing
with a fly; drifted down again under a big chestnut tree, all covered
with pyramids of white blossoms, and turned up the left arm of the
river. The water was shallower here, and now and then gravelly shoals
appeared above the surface. They frequently ran aground, and made no
less than three futile attempts to get round a sharp corner, where the
stream running swiftly took the nose of the boat into the bank, and the
Babe swore gently at them all, and told them to mark the finish, and
get their hands away.
A long lane of quiet shallow water leads to the tail of the pool, and
here the river spreads out into a broad deep basin. Grey sluice gates,
flanked with red brick form the head of it, and on one side stretches
out a green meadow, on the other there rises out of an undergrowth of
hazel and hemlock, a copse of tall trees, where the nightingales always
omit to sing. They ran the boat in at the edge of the copse, and Reggie
lighted the spirit lamp to boil the kettle for tea, while the Babe
tied up Mr. Sykes, lest he should forget himself at the sight of four
bathers.
Among sensuous pleasures, bathing on a hot day stands alone, and
Byron’s Pool is in the first flight of bathing places. There are some
who prefer Romney Weir, and say that bathing is nought unless you
plunge into a soda water of bubbles; some think that the essence of
bathing is a mere pickling of the human form in brine, and are not
happy except in the sea; to others the _joie de baigner_ consists of
flashing through the air much as M. Doré has pictured Satan falling
down from Heaven. But in Byron’s Pool the reflective, or what we may
call the garden bather is well off. He has clean water deep to the
edge, a grassy slope shadowed by trees to dry on, and a boat to take a
header from. Even Mr. Stevenson, a precisian in these matters, would
allow “that the imagination takes a share in such a cleansing.” And by
the time they were dressed, the kettle was boiling, and Fortune smiled
on them.
The Babe refused, however, to stir before he had drunk four cups of
tea, and in consequence the kettle had to be boiled again.
“Besides,” said he, “Mr. Sykes hasn’t had his second cup.”
It was generally felt that this was more important than the Babe’s
fourth cup, and Reggie filled the kettle.
“The Babe’s pensive,” he said, “What is it, Babe?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get pensive on fine days or on wet evenings,
but it doesn’t usually last long. I think I want to fall in love.”
“Well it’s May week next week.”
“One is always supposed to fall in love with each other’s sisters in
May week,” remarked the Babe with a fine disregard of grammar. “But the
sisters either die of consumption or else the Dean snaps them up, and
so it doesn’t come off. Besides one so seldom does what one is supposed
to do.”
“Not often. Byron was supposed to bathe here for instance, and you are
supposed to be in by ten to-night, Babe.”
“Napoleon said--” began the Babe.
“Dry up. Why did they gate you?”
“For repeated warnings, I believe. I never asked them to warn me. They
go and warn me,” said the Babe, getting a little shrill, “and then they
go and gate me for it. I have been allowed no voice whatever in the
matter.”
“What did they warn you about?”
“Oh, it was Bill and the bicycle between them, and the time, and the
place. Life is a sad business, and mine is a hard lot.”
“You are a bad lot,” suggested Jack.
“Jack, for God’s sake don’t be funny,” said Ealing.
“I thought the Babe wanted a little cheering up. I know he likes being
called a bad lot. He isn’t really.”
“It is quite true,” said the Babe in a hollow voice. “I have tried to
go to the devil, and I can’t. It is the most tedious process. Virtue
and simplicity are stamped on my face and my nature. I am like Queen
Elizabeth. I was really cut out to be a milkmaid. I don’t want to get
drunk, or to cultivate the lower female. The more wine I drink, the
sleepier I get; I have to pinch myself to keep awake, and I should
be sleeping like a dead pig long before I got the least intoxicated.
Even then if you woke me up I could say the most difficult words like
Ranjitsinghi without the least incoherence. And as for the lower
female--well, I had to wait at the station the other day for half an
hour, so I thought it was a good opportunity to talk to the barmaid at
the refreshment room. So I ordered a whiskey and soda and called her
‘Miss.’ I did indeed.”
“What a wicked Babe.”
“I did call her Miss. ‘Miss,’ I tell you,” shouted the Babe. “Then I
said it was a beautiful day, and she said ‘Yes, dear.’ She called me
‘dear,’ and I submitted. I didn’t throw the whiskey and soda at her, I
didn’t call for help or give her in charge. I determined to go through
with it. She was a mass of well-matured charms, and she breathed
heavily through her nose. Round her neck she had a massive silver
locket on with ‘Pizgah,’ or ‘Kibroth Hataavah,’ or ‘Jehovah Nisi’ upon
it.”
“Decree Nisi,” suggested Ealing.
“She looked affectionately at me,” continued the Babe, “and a cold
shudder ran through me. She asked me if I would treat her to a glass
of port, _port_, at a quarter-past four in the afternoon. I said, ‘By
all means,’ and she pulled a sort of lever, the kind of thing you put
a train into a siding with, and out came port, which she drank. Then
she said smilingly, ‘’Aven’t seen you for a long time,’ which was quite
true, as I’d never set foot in the place before, and she won’t see me
again for an equally long time. I waited there ten minutes, ten whole
ghastly minutes, and the words froze on my tongue, and the thoughts in
my brain. For the life of me I could not think of another thing to say.
She continued to smile at me all the time. She smiled for ten minutes
without stopping. And so we parted. The kettle is boiling, Reggie.”
The Babe mixed Mr. Sykes’s second cup for him and drank his fourth.
“It is no use,” he said. “I am irredeemably silly, and I have no other
characteristic whatever. My golden youth is slipping from me in the
meantime.”
Reggie shouted.
“The Babe thinks he is growing old. We don’t agree with him. Of course
he is old in everything else, but not in years. Babe, if you’re ready
we’ll go on. We’ve got to haul the boat over here.”
The Babe jumped up with sudden alacrity.
“All right. Mr. Sykes and I will get out. We shall only be in the way.
Come on, Bill.”
“No, Babe,” said Jack, “you shirked before. You shall at least carry
the hampers.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said the Babe with dignity, and on
this point he was quite polite but perfectly firm.
They rowed a mile or so farther up, and the Babe selected a suitable
place for dinner, at the edge of a hayfield and under a willow tree,
and a smile of kind indulgence towards the world in general began to
overscore his fruitless regrets of the afternoon. It was after eight
when they began dinner, and the Babe’s commissariat was plentiful and
elaborate. The only dish that failed to give satisfaction was the
toasted cheese with which he insisted they should finish dinner. It was
made in the tea kettle, and when melted, poured out through the spout
on to biscuits. Mr. Sykes and the Babe alone attempted to eat it, and
Mr. Sykes who ate less than the Babe was excessively unwell shortly
afterwards.
“But for that,” said the Babe, drinking Chartreuse out of a tea-cup, “I
blame the lobster.”
The moon, as big as a bandbox, was just rising clear of the trees, and
the Babe produced cigars.
“For mine,” he said, “is one of those rare, generous natures that does
unto others what it would not do unto itself. It all comes in the
catechism. I will thank any one for a simple paper cigarette.”
“Speech,” said Ealing. “As Stewart.”
The Babe bowed, and began, drawling out his words in a low, slow,
musical voice.
“Mr. Sykes and gentlemen,” he said, “the May week is upon us, and
we, like the _Cambridge Review_, are at the end of another year of
University life and thought. Some of us--most of us in fact, have
experienced for two years the widening influence and varied duties
which are inseparable from the minds of any of those who embark upon
the harvest of University curriculum with any earnestness of purpose,
or seriousness of aim. I think, in fact, I am right in believing that
my friend Mr. Reginald Bristow alone--to continue a few of my less
mixed metaphors--has put out only a year’s space upon the sea of
those special features, which mark the career and are the hinge of
the prospects of those miners after perfectly useless knowledge who
seek to increase their general ignorance among the purlieus of Alma
Mater. Some of us have failed in attaining the objects of our various
ambitions, and I am happy to say that none of us have really tried to
do so. We have none of us gone to the devil, and he with characteristic
exclusiveness has kept aloof from us all. [Cheers] We none of us play
cricket for the University, though I once knew a man who got his extra
square at chess; he was a dear boy, but he is dead now, and there is
not the slightest fear that anything will prevent us from being unable
to fail in obtaining a very respectable place in our Triposes. Yes,
the May week, which occurs in June and lasts a fortnight, spoken of,
I may say sung of in the pages of the _Junior Dean_ and _The Fellow
of Trinity_, is upon us. Personally I detest the May week and I am
subscribing to the Grace testimonial fund simply and solely because
I abhor the boat procession, but before long our stately chapels and
storied urns [cheers] will echo to the sound of girlish laughter and
maternal feet. Gentlemen, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for
the very sincere way in which this toast has been received, and am
happy to declare that the Institution is now open, and the meeting
adjourned _sine die_.”
* * * * *
Going home, the Babe had to stand in the bows to look out for snags
and shoals. He carried a lantern in his hand by the light of which he
scrutinised with agonised intentness the dark surface of the water.
Just above Byron’s Pool the boat ran into a sunken tree trunk and the
Babe and his lantern plunged heavily into the water. So he dressed
himself in the tablecloth, and his appearance was inimitable. He did
not stop in Cambridge for the May week.
VII.--THE BABE’S “SAPPING.”
Lo, when an oyster, succulent and tender,
Leagued with lemon, courted by cayenne,
Makes its inevitable sweet surrender,
Delicately dies, it knows not why or when,--
“Could aught atone?” pathetically asked he,
He whom ye wot, to find that unaware
Oysters would be indubitably nasty,
Natives or not, because July is here?
ST. SWITHIN.
The Babe spent June and the first half of July in London. He painted
his bicycle white with Mr. Aspinall’s best enamel, and presented a very
elegant appearance on it every morning in Battersea Park. The elections
were on, and his father, who represented the Conservative interests of
a manufacturing town in the North of England, was absent from London,
in the hopes of representing them again. But party questions did not
interest his son, and the Babe, reflecting that whether the Liberals
or Conservatives governed the country, Battersea Park would still be
open to him and his bicycle, pursued his calm course on a moderately
evenly-balanced wheel.
So the Babe had a commodious house in Prince’s Gate at his disposal.
For he was the only child, and his mother, who was a keener politician
even than his father, accompanied the latter on his political errands.
It occurred to him that he might turn an honest penny by letting the
whole of the first floor for a week or two after the manner of Mr.
Somerset, when he found himself in possession of the Superfluous
Mansion, but after some consideration, he dismissed this as an unworthy
and inconvenient economy, and telegraphed to Reggie to leave Cambridge
and the May week to take care of themselves and join him. Reggie had
kept his term, so he obeyed, taking with him several classical books,
for the Babe, so he said in his telegram, meant to “sap.”
The Babe’s “sapping” was conducted on highly original principles. He
got up at eight, “in order,” he said, “to get a long morning,” had
a cup of tea, and then took his bicycle with him in his mother’s
victoria to Battersea Park, where he rode till ten, and then had
breakfast. He got back to Prince’s Gate about eleven in the victoria
which waited for him at the Park, had a bath and dressed, and usually
went off to Lord’s where he watched cricket till lunch time from the
top of the pavilion, and if the match was interesting stopped on till
about five. He then went to the Bath Club where he bathed and had tea,
returning home in time to dress for dinner, which he usually took at a
friend’s house. The evening was spent at a theatre or a music hall, and
he finished up if possible at a dance. If he had no dance to go to, he
read the evening paper at a club, and went to bed.
“In fact,” as he explained to Reggie, who arrived one evening about
seven, “we shall lead a simple and strenuous life even in the midst
of this modern Babylon. The bicycle and the Bath Club will minister
to the needs of the body, and our minds will minister to each other.
We take our dinner to-night at home, and after dinner it would be
rash not to see Miss Cecilia Loftus. She can dance like fun. I hope
you have brought some books, for otherwise you will have nothing to
do when I am working. It’s time to dress. I see my father made four
speeches yesterday. His energy is perfectly amazing. We will send for
the evening paper, for there are things of overwhelming interest in it,
I am told, apart from politics.”
The programme at the “Pavilion” waned in interest after the performance
of Miss Cecilia Loftus, and about eleven the Babe proposed an
adjournment. It was a warm clear night, and they started back, walking
along Piccadilly instead of taking a hansom. The streets were full,
and characteristically “London,” in other words they were crowded with
all sorts and conditions of men and women, who eyed one another with
suspicious reserve. In Paris the birds of night look at each other with
friendly interest, in London with mistrust and enmity.
The Babe was in an expansive mood, and like Byron, he bitterly
lamented his own loneliness in the crowd.
“Here am I,” he said, “a young man of pleasing manner, and amiable
disposition, and I feel like a solitary wayfarer in the desert of
Sahara. When the four men in the _New Arabian Nights_ left Prince
Florizel’s smoking divan, and plunged into the roaring streets, they
were engulfed by strange adventures before they had gone a hundred
yards. The Lady of the Superfluous Mansion annexed one, the Fair
Cuban another, the man with the chin beard a third. What could be
more delightful? And yet I might walk the streets till the crack of
doom, and the archangels would have to send me home at the last, still
adventureless.”
“Poor Babe,” said Reggie, “but perhaps every one else is in the same
plight; perhaps they are all longing for you to speak to them.”
“I don’t think so,” said the Babe, “they seem to me supremely
indifferent as to whether I speak to them or not. What are we to do,
Reggie? The night is yet young, but we are growing old. I think a
little supper, four or five dozen native lobsters, as Mrs. Nickleby
suggested, would not hurt us. I hear that there is a most commodious
restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. It would be well to be certain on
that point. We are walking in the wrong direction but we will do so
no longer. Let us take a hansom. Nothing will happen to us. But we
will give this wicked world one more chance. We will walk back across
Leicester Square. It is supposed to be the fountain-head of all
adventures, and the home of all adventurers. We will loiter there a few
moments.”
“What sort of adventures do you want, Babe?” asked Reggie.
“Why that’s exactly what I couldn’t tell you,” said the Babe, “the
point of an adventure is that it is absolutely unexpected. If I could
tell you what I wanted, it would cease to be unexpected, and therefore
cease to be an adventure. If you know what you are going to do, it is
no adventure. But it’s no use: unexpected things never happen. We will
take a cab and eat oysters. Perhaps the oysters will be stale, and if
so, it will be a kind of adventure, for they are invariably fresh at
the Savoy.”