shabby building, resembling an overgrown barn, one of the “greater
barns,” so said the Babe, mentioned in a parable. A low tunnel,
resembling the subway in Metropolitan underground stations led into it
from the street, and from the tunnel opened various doors, which led
into rooms resembling economically constructed kennels. One of these,
humorously called the smoking-room, presumably because the audience
invariably smoked in the passage, was rendered additionally alluring by
a long, low plank, like those supplied to third class waiting-rooms,
which ran down the length of it. The outer wall, in all its unveiled
glory of brick and mortar, was further decorated by photographs of the
Compton Company, in which actors and actresses alike seemed devoured
by a futile endeavour to acquire those casts of expression which are
associated with “persons of genius and sensibility.” A man was engaged
in kindling reluctant footlights when the Babe entered, and he had
time to bestow the minutest attention on the very vivid drop-scene
which was down, before the others appeared. It represented a gloomy
and nameless marsh, in the corner of which was moored a magenta boat,
into which a young lady in a green bonnet was being assisted by a
young gentleman of abhorrent demeanour and odiously familiar manner.
He wore a straw hat and a blue frock-coat, and was smoking an enormous
cigar. Over their heads hovered a gigantic bird of prey, probably a
vulture, confident no doubt that the fatal exhalations from the marsh,
or their own unfitness to live, would soon supply him with a delicate
supper composed of the remains of this ill-attired pair. A painted but
unexplained Venetian mast--in popular language, a barber’s pole--stuck
out of the bulrushes in the middle distance, and behind, the sun
appeared to have just set in a gory sky over the mountains, which stood
up brilliantly blue in the background.
It was a miserably cold morning, and Clytemnestra sat in a thick ulster
with a bull-dog on her knees, till it was time for her to appear, and
watched a curiously dressed chorus of Argive elders headed by Reggie in
flannels and a blazer, for he had been playing tennis, manœuvre round a
stage director, whom a vivid imagination construed into an altar. Two
other stage directors quarrelled with each other in the background,
till the conductor who was directing the chorus asked them to be quiet.
Thus he secured for himself the hostility of all the stage directors,
who resented the attack made on their class, and who lay in wait to
contradict him rudely on the earliest possible occasion.
The Babe, meantime, had wandered off the stage into the wings, in
search of a fire, and Mr. Sykes, left to himself, recognised Reggie as
a friend among the heterogeneous elders, and trotted across to him,
wheezing pathetically. The conductor had stopped the chorus in order to
point out some mistake the tenors had made, and was singing the passage
himself in a fruity falsetto voice, and Reggie, who was a bass, was
patting Sykes, when the voice of one of the hostile stage directors
broke in--
“The rehearsal,” he said firmly, “will proceed when the leader of the
Argive elders has quite finished playing with a bull-dog. Please send
the bull-dog out of the theatre.”
“It’s Clytemnestra’s,” said Reggie.
The Babe re-appeared at this moment.
“Where’s Bill?” he asked. “Oh, there he is. Come here, darling. Oh, are
you waiting for me?”
The conductor laid down his baton.
“Settle it among yourselves,” he said, “and tell me when you are ready.
I may remark that I am very busy, and that my time is not my own.”
Mr. Sykes meantime was sniffing suspiciously round the heels of the
altar, and the altar was getting visibly nervous.
The Babe supposing that his entrance had come, began reciting his first
lines in a loud voice, and the stage directors and the conductors made
common cause against him.
“If Clytemnestra would kindly be quiet,” said one.
“And take away her horrible dog,” put in the altar.
“The chorus might proceed,” shouted the conductor.
The Babe with a look of injured innocence on his face retired to his
chair, followed reluctantly by Sykes, who was not satisfied about the
altar, and the practice went on.
But the truce between the conductor and the stage directors was only an
armed neutrality. One of them in particular, a bustling little man with
a honey-coloured moustache and a Paderewski head of hair, was waiting
to fall upon him. He was a student of all branches of what Stewart
would have called “delightful and useless knowledge”; on such subjects
he has perhaps a wider and more elaborately specialised information
than any man in England. He could have told you with the most minute
particulars the exact shape of the earrings worn by Greek
women of the fifth century B.C., the particular way in which
athletes of the fourth century brushed their hair, the conformation
of the lobe of the ear in female statues of the third century, or
the proportionate length of the little finger nail to the eye-socket
in bronzes of the Hadrian epoch. He could have prescribed you the
ingredients which made the red in Botticelli’s Tobias, lasting, through
the want of which Turner’s sunsets paled almost as fast as the sunsets
themselves; he had penetrated into the dens of the forgers at Rome
which lie in the street which no one can find between the Via Nazionale
and the Capitol; he had been twice round the world, and spoke five
dialects of Mexican; he had looked on the city of Mecca, and kodaked
the interior of the mosque of the Seven Curses of the Prophet; he had
dived for pearls in the Coromandel Sea, and evaded by a hair-breadth
the jaws of the blue-nosed shark as it rolled over on its back to snap
him in two; he knew intimately a lineal descendant of Adamo di Brescia,
the coiner of the Inferno, and asserted that in all probability the
forefather was a clumsier workman than his son, or he would never
have been detected. And on all these subjects and many others equally
abstruse he could give you statistics, as dry as the facts themselves
were interesting. Once or twice, it is true, he had been caught in
an apparent error, but he had always been able to give a perfectly
satisfactory explanation of it afterwards, with hardly any time for
reflection. Such qualifications had eminently fitted him for the part
of stage-manager in a Greek play, and he certainly added to these,
immense zeal and industry. His name was Propert, and his college was
Peterhouse.
For some minutes he stood grasping his hair with both hands in an
incipient frenzy, as the chorus proceeded, but at last he could stand
it no longer, and he clapped his hands loudly.
“It is all wrong,” he said, “you have not got the spirit of it. You
do not sound the note of fate. Those last bars should be a long low
wail, prophetic of woe, and _pianissimo--pianissimo ma con smorgando
tremuloso_.”
He patted the air in front of Reggie, with an eloquent gesture.
“They are marked _ff._,” said the leader of the Argive elders in good
plain English.
“Well, you must erase your double forte,” said Dr. Propert.
The conductor folded his arms, and waited till Dr. Propert had retired
up O. P.
“We will now begin again four bars back, at the double forte,” he
remarked.
“Yes, _pianissimo_,” said the doctor turning round.
The Argive elders looked puzzled. Diplomacy, to judge by their
speeches, was not their strong point.
“Are we to do it double forte or _pianissimo_?” asked Reggie of the
conductor.
“I presume that Doctor Propert has informed Professor Damien of the
alterations he has thought fit to make in the music,” he remarked
bitterly.
But as Doctor Propert was already employed in showing Agamemnon,
who was about to enter, how to lean against a door in the attitude
of a Sophoclean adult, the sarcasm fell innocuous, and the practice
proceeded _fortissimo_ without further interruption.
Agamemnon had forgotten his first line, and at Dr. Propert’s suggestion
said “Boble, boble, boble,” until he remembered the second or third
lines, and the chorus grouped themselves round the watchmen and smoked,
while the altar, relieved of its localising duties, quarrelled with the
other unemployed directors, and prompted Agamemnon intermittently.
But as the scene between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra proceeded and
the Babe warmed to his work, other conversation drooped and died.
He found it bored him simply to say the part, and throughout the
rehearsals, even when he had to read his part, he acted it all. But
at this stage in rehearsal he knew it by heart, and in looking at him
one quite forgot his deerstalker cap and long, loud ulster. The stage
directors were reconciled and murmured approbation, the conductor
ceased talking to the watchmen, and the thing began to take shape.
Even the subsequent appearance of Mr. Sykes, who sat down in the middle
of the stage and smiled at the chorus, caused no interruption. He fell
perfectly flat, and no one took the slightest notice of him.
Once only was there an interruption, and that was made by the Babe
himself. Dr. Propert was busy hauling a metope on to the stage, and
letting go of it for a moment, it fell resonantly onto its back. The
Babe stopped dead, and turned round.
“If you make such a horrible row again, while I’m on,” he said, “you
may take the part of Clytemnestra yourself. I shall begin again,” he
added severely, “at the beginning of my speech.”
The conductor could have embraced the Babe on the spot, and the other
stage managers giggled. The Babe waited till they had quite finished,
and then began again thirty-four lines back.
The truth was that all the Babe’s flippancy and foolishness left him
when he was acting, and only then, for acting was the one thing he
took quite seriously. He ceased to be himself, for he threw himself
completely into the character he was impersonating. He was in fact not
an amateur, but an actor, and these two have nothing whatever to do
with one another. If a man has dramatic power, he may become an actor
with training, without it he cannot. And most amateurs have not got it.
So the play proceeded with vigour till Clytemnestra went off with
Ægisthus, and shortly after in a hansom with Mr. Sykes. The cold
drizzle of the morning had turned to snow, and the melting snow in the
streets looked like thin coffee ice. The Babe was playing in a college
match that afternoon, and the prospect filled him with a mild despair.
XII.--A COLLEGE SUNDAY.
“This gloomy tone,” he said, “is far too rife;
I’ll demonstrate the loveliness of life.”--HOTCH-POTCH VERSES.
Reggie and Ealing had moved into a set of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings,
which they shared together. The set consisted of three rooms, two inner
and smaller ones, and one large room looking out on to the front court
of King’s. The two smaller rooms they used as bedrooms, but as they
each had folding Eton beds, by half-past nine or so every morning,
provided that they got up in reasonable time, they were converted for
the day into sitting-rooms. The outer room was furnished more with
regard to what furniture they had, than what furniture it required.
Thus there were two pianos, tuned about a quarter of a tone apart from
each other, two grandfather’s clocks, and a most deficient supply of
chairs. “However,” as Reggie said, “one can always sit on the piano.”
Ealing’s powers of execution on the piano were limited. He could play
hymn-tunes, or other compositions, where the next chord to the one he
was engaged on followed as a corollary from it, and anything in the
world which went so slowly as to enable him to glance from the music
to his hands between each chord, however complicated it was, provided
it did not contain a double sharp, which he always played wrong. He
could also, by dint of long practice, play “Father O’Flynn” and the
first verse of “Off to Philadelphia in the Morning”; and there seemed
to be no reason why, with industry, he should not be able to acquire
the power of playing the other verses, in which he considered the
chords to be most irregular and unexpected, deserting the air at the
most crucial points. Reggie, however, was far more accomplished. He had
got past hymn-tunes. The Intermezzo in _Cavaleria Rusticana_--even the
palpitating part--was from force of repetition mere child’s play to
him, and he aspired to the slow movements out of Beethoven’s Sonatas.
The hours in which each might practise, therefore, demanded careful
arrangement. College regulations forbade the use of the pianos
altogether between nine in the morning, and two in the afternoon, since
it was popularly supposed by the authorities who framed this rule--and
who shall say them nay--that all undergraduates worked between these
hours, and that the sound of a piano would disturb them.
Consequently, Ealing was allowed to play between eight A.M.
and nine A.M., every morning, a privilege which he used
intermittently during breakfast, and by which he drove Reggie,
daily, to the verge of insanity, and Reggie between two P.M.
and three P.M. Ealing again might play between three and
five, and Reggie from five to seven. During these hours the temporary
captain of the pianos, even if he did not wish to play himself, might
stop the other from playing except with the soft pedal down. It had
been found impossible to regulate the hours after dinner, and they
often played simultaneously on their several pianos, and produced
thereby very curious and interesting effects, which sounded Wagnerian
at a sufficient distance. Finally, the use of the piano was totally
prohibited by common consent between two A.M. and eight
A.M.
The Babe, like mournful Œnone, “hither came at noon” one Sunday
morning. Chapel at King’s was at half-past ten, and that English habit
of mind which weds indissolubly together Sunday morning and lying in
bed, was responsible for the fact that on Sunday Reggie and Ealing
always breakfasted after chapel. But the Babe, unlike that young lady,
was in the best of spirits, and as Ealing and Reggie were not yet back
from chapel, made tea and began breakfast without them. They came in a
few minutes later, both rather cross.
“When there is going to be a sermon,” said Reggie severely, taking off
his surplice, “I consider that I have a right to be told. Morning,
Babe.”
“Oh, have you had a sermon?” said the Babe sweetly. “Who preached?”
“The Dean. He preached for half-an-hour.”
“More than half-an-hour,” said Ealing. “Totally inaudible, of course,
but lengthy to make up for that.”
“Pour me out some tea, Babe, if you’ve had the sense to make it.”
“Sermons are trying if one hasn’t breakfasted,” said the Babe. “They
are sermons in stones when one asks for bread.”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea. I hoped that perhaps one of you would
know. Why should I know what I mean? It’s other people’s business to
find out. And they for the most part neglect it shamefully.”
“Shut up, Babe,” growled Reggie. “I wish you wouldn’t talk when I’m
eating.”
“Can’t you hear yourself eat?” asked the Babe sympathetically.
“Wild horses shall not drag me to Chapel this afternoon,” said Ealing.
“We’ll go for a walk, Reggie.”
“I daresay: at present I can’t think of anything but food. Babe, you
greedy hog, give me some fish.”
“And very good fish it is,” said the Babe genially. “By the way, Sykes
is far from well this morning.”
“What’s the matter with him?”
“He partook too freely of the anchovies of the Chitchat last night. You
will find that in French conversation books.”
“I saw him indulging as I thought unwisely,” said Ealing. “Then it was
surely imprudent of him to drink Moselle cup.”
“He wished to drown care, but it only gave him a stomach-ache. Stewart
impressed him so with the fact that we were all Atlases with the burden
of the world on our shoulders, that he had recourse to the cup.”
“And the burden of us all was on Stewart.”
“Yes. Don’t you remember he said that he felt personally responsible
for every undergraduate whom he had ever spoken to? His idea is
that each don ought to have an unlimited influence, and that the
whole future of England in the next generation lay on each of them,
particularly himself. No wonder his eyelids were a little weary, as
Mr. Pater says. But after you went he took the other side, and said
that the undergraduates were the _raison d’être_ of the University, and
that the dons existed only by their sufferance.”
“Did Longridge stop?”
“Yes. He was a little less coherent than usual. I know he took the case
of a man at Oxford who threw stones at the deer in Magdalen, though
what conclusion he drew from it, I can’t say.”
“Probably that the deer were really responsible for the undergraduates.”
The Babe sighed.
“I have to read a paper next week. I think it shall be on some aspects
of Longridge. That is sure to give rise to a discussion if he is there.
Give me a cigarette, Reggie.”
The Babe established himself in a big chair by the fireplace, while the
others finished breakfast.
“I am going to found a club,” he said, “called the S.C.D. or Society
for the Cultivation of Dons. Stewart says he will be vice-president,
as he doesn’t consider himself a don. We are going to call on obscure
dons every afternoon and speak to them of the loveliness of life,
for, as Stewart says, the majority of them have no conception of it.
Their lives are bounded by narrow horizons, and the only glimpse they
catch of the great world, is their bed-maker as she carries out their
slop-pail from their bedrooms. They live like the Niebelungs in dark
holes and eat roots, and though they are merely animals, they have no
animal spirits. He says he knew a don once who by a sort of process of
spontaneous combustion, became a dictionary, but all the interesting
words, the sort of words one looks out in a Bible dictionary, you know,
were missing. So they used him to light fires with, for which he was
admirably adapted, being very dry, and in the manner of King Alexander,
who, as Stewart asserted, became the bung in a wine cork, other dons
now warm themselves at him. Stewart was very entertaining last night,
and rather improper. He said that a Don Juan or two was wanted among
the dons, by way of compensation, and he enlarged on the subject.”
“Give us his enlargements.”
“I can’t. He enlarged in a way that belongs to the hour after midnight
on Saturday, when you know that when you wake up it will be Sunday.
He was very Saturday-night. He called it working off the arrears of
the week, and complained that he hadn’t heard a mouth-filling oath for
more than a month. He never swears himself, but he likes to hear other
people do it; for he says he is in a morbid terror of the millennium
beginning without his knowing it. He skipped about in short skirted
epigrams, and pink-tight phrases. At least that was his account of his
own conversation when we parted. Oh yes, and he said he didn’t mind
saying these things to me because I was a man of the world.”
“He knows your weak points, Babe,” said Reggie.
“Not at all. He referred to that as my strong point.”
“Good old Clytemnestra! I’m better now, thank you, after my breakfast,
and it’s ‘The Sorrows of Death’ this afternoon. I shall go to chapel
again.”
Reggie lit a pipe, and picked out the first few bars on the piano.
“The watchman was a tiresome sort of man to have about,” he said. “When
they asked him if it was nearly morning, he only said, ‘Though the
morning will come, the night will come also.’ Of course they knew that
already, and besides it wasn’t the question. I should have dismissed
him on the spot. So the soprano has to tell them, which he does on the
top A mainly.”
“When I was a child I could sing the upper upper Z,” said the Babe
fatuously. “Then my voice broke, and the moral is ‘Deeper and deeper
yet.’ Don’t rag: I apologise.”
Ealing finished breakfast last, and strolled across to the window.
“It’s a heavenly morning,” he said. “Let’s go out. We needn’t go far.”
“I will walk no further than the King’s field,” said the Babe.
“Very well, and we can sit outside the pavilion. I’m lunching out at
half-past one.”
“Meals do run together so on Sunday. Sunday is really one long attack
of confluent mastication,” said the Babe. “It’s a pity one can’t take
them simultaneously.”
Though November had already begun, the air was deliciously warm and
mild, and had it not been for the fast yellowing trees, one would have
guessed it to be May. But there was a shouting wind overhead, which
stripped off the leaves by hundreds and blew the rooks about the sky.
Already the tops of the trees were bare, and the nests of last spring
swung empty and half ruined high up among the forks of the branches.
During the last week a good deal of rain had fallen, and the Cam was
swirling down, yellow and turbid. The willow by the river was already
quite bare, and its thin feathery branches lashed themselves against
the stone coping of the bridge.
They went through the Fellows’ gardens, for Reggie by some means had
got hold of a key; there a few bushes of draggled Michaelmas daisies
were making pretence that the summer was not quite dead yet, but they
only succeeded in calling attention to the long, desolate beds. The
grass was growing rank and matted under the autumn rains, and little
eddies of leaves had drifted up against the wires of the disused
croquet-hoops. But the day itself seemed stolen from off the lap of
spring, and two thrushes were singing in the bushes after an excellent
breakfast of succulent worms.
“We play you to-morrow at Rugger,” remarked the Babe as they walked
across the field, “and we play on this ground. It’s sticky enough, and
I shall vex the soul of the half opposite me, because I like a sticky
ground, and he is certain not to. In fact,” said he confidently, “I
purpose to get two tries off my own bat, and generally to sit on this
royal and ancient foundation.”
“The Babe has never yet been called modest,” said Ealing.
“If I have, I am not aware of it,” said the Babe.
“We’ve got three blues,” remarked Reggie.
“I am delighted to hear it,” said the Babe. “You will need them all.
And you may tell our mutual friend Hargreave that if he attempts to
collar me round the ancles again, I shall make no efforts whatever to
avoid kicking him in the face. He did it last time we played you, and I
spoke to him about it more in sorrow than in anger.”
“Upon which the referee warned you for using sorrowful language.”
“He did take that liberty,” conceded the Babe. “Let’s sit down outside
the pavilion. I wish we could kick about. The Sabbath is made for man,
and so is Sunday, and so are footballs.”
“But on Sunday the pavilion is locked up by man, and the footballs put
inside.”
“It appears so. English people take Sunday too seriously, just as they
take everything else, except me.”
“Anyhow, Stewart says you are a man of the world,” said Ealing.
“He does, and who are we to contradict him? Good Lord, there’s one
o’clock striking. I must go home. There’s somebody coming to lunch at
half-past. Reggie, get me a ticket for King’s this afternoon, will
you?”
XIII.--KING’S CHAPEL.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory.
SHELLEY.
Reggie and the Babe got into chapel just after the voluntary had begun,
and slow soft notes came floating drowsily down from the echoes in the
roof. The chapel and ante-chapel were both full, and from the door
in the dim, mellow half-darkness, a sea of heads stretched up to the
black wooden screen, through which streamed the light from the chapel
itself. In the roof one could just see the delicate fan-shaped lines
of vaulting springing across like lotus leaves from wall to wall, and
the windows on the south side gleamed with dark, rich colour from the
sky already turning red with the southwestern setting sun. As they went
up the ante-chapel the Babe saw a seat still unoccupied, and preferred
stopping there to going into the chapel.
[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE. SCREEN AND GATEWAY.]
Reggie’s seat was just east of the choir opposite to the window
representing Christ standing in the garden after the resurrection. To
the right kneels Mary Magdalene gaudily dressed, just having turned
and seeing that he was not, as she supposed, only the gardener. To the
left rises a green hill, on the top of which, below a row of brown,
ragged rocks, stands the empty tomb, with the women round it. By a
quaint but curiously felicitous idea of the artist, the figure of
Christ is holding a spade in his hand, as if to give colour to Mary’s
mistake. His face is Divine, but graciously human, and he waits for the
recognition.