worldliness, hurry, and unprofitable strivings that perhaps has a
certain value, which is not necessarily diminished because it is
impossible to account for it statistically or categorically. There is
something in spacious grey buildings and perfect Gothic architecture,
shared too by broad grass lawns and studious, quiet places and
uneventful lives, that cannot be altogether left out of the reckoning
when one adds up the total value of a University as compared with
a modern endowed plan of education, or the admirable schemes of
University extension.
And the choir which walked slowly up the aisle into their
places, though composed of ordinary little boys, lay clerks, and
undergraduates, somehow brought themselves into harmony with it.
On week days the little boys no doubt were entirely human, and
probably concealed surreptitious sweet stuff in their pockets; the
lay clerks wore bowler hats and tail coats, and belonged to the most
unprepossessing class which England produces, and the undergraduates
were only undergraduates. But for the time they were part of a
wonderful idea, and were performing the office set apart for them by a
royal founder.
The last echo from the roof died away, and the service began, and
though Reggie was not conscious of attending very closely to it, he was
still aware of the good and kindly atmosphere about him, an atmosphere
which soothed and quieted, and drove the thoughts inward. He had often
felt it before, on other winter afternoons in chapel, and as far as
he knew, for he did not consciously think about it, it had made no
difference to him. But as no impression is without its effects, we must
presume that it had made a difference to him, though he had not been
aware of it.
Not long before, the organ had been repaired, and in great part
renewed, and it was worthy of its surroundings and its appearance.
Golden sheaves of pipes gleamed out between the dark wooden case, and
on top of the two turrets looking west, stood two great angels with
brazen trumpets to their mouths, and when the “tuba” speaks, one cannot
help imagining that it is their trumpets which are sounding. To-day
“The Lord thundered out of heaven,” and one could think that the air
for a moment grew thick with sound, which increased till it shattered
the growing darkness, splitting it with lightning made audible.
By the end of the Psalms it had grown quite dark outside, and the
windows showed black between the delicate tracery. From the lectern
came the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, “of the watcher and the Holy
One,” and afterwards of the Holy One who watched alone among the olives
in the Garden of Gethsemane, a king, not of Babylon, but of the whole
earth, who had not where to lay his head.
The stalls and sub-stalls were all full of members of the college, in
surplices, but the black crowd beyond stretched up to the steps of the
altar, and when the three bars of introduction to the solo began, every
one stood up. Mendelssohn, so often only correct, so often ruined by
his fatal prettiness, has here struck the right note, full and firm.
Even Reggie ceased to think of the evasiveness of the watchman, and
only listened, till the repeated call of the minor died away into a
long pause before the soprano answered, and the choir took up the full
chorus.
Outside in the ante-chapel, though only for a little while, the Babe
ceased from his customary futility of thought, and the slow opening of
the carved wooden doors in the screen, and the drawing of the crimson
curtain, at the end of service, still found him meditative.
As the choir came out, framed in a long shaft of light, the organ was
played quietly, and then paused for a moment, while a great pedal
note made the air shake and quiver in sensation rather than sound.
Then the full organ burst out with the _Occasional Overture_, as the
congregation from the chapel streamed out after the members of the
college. The first movement marched, and marching marshalled whole
armies of sound, which stood waiting while the second rippled and
laughed and sang with all the breezes of heaven behind it, and the
third dwelt dreamily on what had gone, and thought of what was to come.
Then in the last movement, battalion after battalion of major chords,
from choir and swell and great organ, grew and multiplied in all their
forces, the flutes and piccolos, the twelfths and fifteenths as flying
squadrons on the wings, and the diapasons the lords of sound in the
centre, an exceeding great army. Then at the second repeat the “tuba”
woke in the “huge house of sounds,” and the thing was complete, a fixed
star for ever in the heavens of harmony.
XIV.--A VARIETY ENTERTAINMENT.
In truth
I know of noone so adaptable.
OLD PLAY.
That evening the Babe dined as a guest with the T.A.F. (which means
Twice A Fortnight, and is a synonym for O.A.W. or Once A Week, and
implies a frankly purposeless and purely social club consisting of
about a dozen members, chiefly undergraduates, who dined together
every Sunday night) and spent a pleasant evening of innocent mirth
and a little music. After dinner one member sang some Scotch songs in
a baritone voice, another played the Pilgrim’s March in _Tannhäuser_
exceedingly badly, omitting the Venus motif, but repeating the Chorus
in a palpitating manner in the higher octave, to make up for it, and
two others recalled to their minds the _Occasional Overture_ which
had been played in chapel that afternoon. A fifth imitated in the
most natural and life-like manner the speech and manners of a don of
the college, three or four read books gloomily in corners, being of a
more serious turn of mind, and the wilder section of the party pressed
the Babe to give them a little skirt-dancing, which he very properly
refused to do, feeling justly enough that it would not be in keeping
with the general character of the proceedings. Later he very unwisely
offered to play picquet with anybody, a proposition which was received
in awkward silence, and hurriedly covered with a buzz of conversation.
Another guest, however, contributed to the harmony of the evening by
describing at great length, the state of the lower classes in Russia,
Germany, Austria, and Turkey in Asia, with realistic and revolting
details. By degrees the other members of the party left their books
and their music, and sat round him in enthusiastic silence. For so
stirring a man, so thought the Babe, there was no excuse and no hope,
for he was not less than thirty years old, and should have known
better. Then he reverted, also at length, to the vastly superior
conditions of our own agricultural labourers and proceeded, still
monologising, by easy transitions, to the prospect of an European war.
On this point his prophecies were most patriotic, and went perfectly
to the tune of “Rule Britannia,” and so afforded everyone present the
greatest satisfaction when they reflected that they were Englishmen.
Metaphorically speaking he slapped them on the back, and filled them
full of roast beef and racial admiration. All his sentiments were
worthy of the highest praise, and it may only have been the personality
of the speaker that inspired the Babe with such speechless horror. He
was just describing the apparatus for shooting torpedoes from submerged
tubes on the _Majestic_, which, in some obscure manner the passport of
Prince Niktivoffski, which he happened to have about him, had enabled
him to inspect, and was saying that no other nation had got anything of
the kind and that they would blow all other navies of the world into a
million of atoms in a moment of time, when the breaking point came for
the Babe, and he rose and said good-night.
He had not got more than half way across the court, when he heard other
sounds of revelry from some rooms on the right, belonging as he knew
to a don of his acquaintance, who was widely and justly famed for his
Sunday evenings at home, and the pleasure-seeking Babe determined to
go in for a few minutes, for like the rest of the University, he had a
standing invitation to come as often as he could. He found himself in a
luxuriously furnished room, quite full of people and of mixed tobacco
smoke. His host greeted him effusively, and gave him to understand that
his cup of happiness was now quite full.
The gathering was meant to be, and succeeded in being, altogether
heterogeneous, and though eminently respectable, had a curious but
unmistakable flavour of ultra-Bohemianism about it. Mr. Swotcham was
sitting on the sofa near the fire talking excitedly to two shaggy
individuals, whom the Babe rightly guessed to be members of the
club, which he had libellously informed the world was the modern
representative of the Hell-fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. He smiled
benignantly at Swotcham, and as he turned away caught the words
“standpoint of determinism.” He had not the slightest idea what they
meant, but they sounded bad. By the table, nibbling biscuits and
helping themselves to tea out of a brass Russian samovar, were standing
three little men, with little moustaches, talking earnestly together,
whose only characteristic seemed to be entire ineffectiveness. Further
on a highly-coloured Italian was expressing fervid thoughts in bad
English, to two young gentlemen who wore their hair in a great frizzled
tuft over their foreheads. This latter type was familiar to the Babe,
and afforded him almost infinite delight; it went to the stalls in the
theatre, where, dressed in Norfolk jackets, it talked together in dark
allusiveness of music-hall _artistes_. It might also be seen in the
streets, in a very short and ragged gown, a broken-backed cap with
the cardboard showing at the edges, not the result of age, but of fell
and evil design, smoking pipes. It gave the world to understand that
it was the very devil of a type, but the world, with a charity that is
rare, considered that though odious, it was not morally so black as its
self-depreciation led it to paint itself.
Arundel prints hung on the walls, and somehow looked as incongruous
there as Mrs. Chant at a music-hall, for the whole atmosphere was
quite extraordinarily secular. Against the wall stood three or four
large bookcases, on the top of which were arranged several admirable
reproductions of antique bronzes and marbles. In one corner on the top
of a scagliola pedestal stood the bust of the young Augustus in marble,
and close to him a bronze Narcissus leaned and held up a listening
finger. On each side of the clock on the mantel-piece was a nude figure
of a youth in bronze, and Botticelli’s Madonna of the Magnificat looked
down at them in mild surprise and seemed to be wondering to what sort
of a place she had come. From a door on the right came the sounds
of the slow movement of Beethoven’s _Sonata Pathétique_, arranged
not as the composer mean it to be played, but for a cello, a violin
and a piano; the piano was a little ahead, but the violin and cello
which were running neck to neck, caught up to it in the scherzo that
followed, and they all finished up amid indescribable indifference on
the part of all present, a dead heat. Everyone talked loudly during the
performance, and took not the slightest notice when it was over, with
the exception of the genial host, who patted all three executants on
the back and said “Awfully jolly, Charlie,” to the cellist. The duty of
a good host, without doubt, is to make everybody talk, and certainly
the musicians and Mr. Waddilove between them succeeded to admiration.
The latter was as ubiquitous and as deft as Mr. Maskelyne’s hands when
he is spinning plates, now giving a touch to the discussion on the
standpoint of determinism, now spurring the Italian on to fresh deeds
of violence towards the Queen’s English, now telling the Babe how he
too, in his earlier years, once acted Clytemnestra with unparalleled
success, and now persuading Charlie to give him another taste of his
cello. In fact, the only group he did not speak to was that of the
three earnest biscuit-nibblers, who had been joined by a fourth, and
who appeared to be of no consequence whatever, as indeed they were not.
Beyond the room where the music was going on, lay another smaller one,
entirely lined with bookcases from floor to ceiling. In one corner
stood a screen, and the Babe having the curiosity to peep over it, saw
behind, Mr. Waddilove’s bed, presided over by a bronze reproduction
of the head of “Sleep” from the British Museum. On the table stood a
liqueur decanter containing a pale pink fluid of which the Babe took
a glass. It reminded him vaguely of almonds and orange peel dissolved
in cherry blossom scent, and Mr. Waddilove entering at the moment told
him it was made exclusively on the estate of Count Zamboletto near
Taormina in Sicily, where he himself had often stayed.
Fresh arrivals kept streaming in; among them two or three members of
the T.A.F., who wandered about looking as if they did not know why they
had come, including the performer of the overture to _Tannhaüser_,
who sat down at the piano, without being asked, and did it again.
He appeared to rouse little or no enthusiasm, and left immediately
afterwards.
In the music-room the President of the Union had got hold of Mr.
Waddilove for a moment, and was discussing the sanitary arrangements
of the Union with him, and particularly whether it was possible to
stop the thefts of nail-scissors which went on so extensively in the
lavatory, and which for no explicable reason, he was inclined to hold
the Indians responsible for. He thought that perhaps they collected
them, in order to barter with them among savage tribes when they went
home. Mr. Waddilove seemed to take but a faint interest in these petty
larcenies, but humourously suggested that they should employ some
lady bicyclists from Slater’s detective agency to see if they could
catch the thieves. That failing, he suggested that they should try
chaining the scissors to the table or to the looking-glass, after
the manner of Bibles in old churches. Close beside them stood the
Senior Wrangler of the last year, talking Psychical Research with
the sub-organist of Trinity. An archdeacon, who looked like a sheep
that had gone very badly astray, was turning over the pages of Max
Nordau’s _Degeneration_, and close to him an undergraduate, with
eyebrows meeting over his nose and the face of a truculent rabbit, was
demonstrating the absurdity of the Christian Faith to two frightened
Freshmen, who seemed willing to agree to anything he might suggest. As
the Babe passed, he heard the words “so-called Resurrection,” and his
smile grew a shade more seraphic.
The Babe wandered back to the outer room, where the discussion on the
standpoint of determinism or some similar subject was still proceeding
shrilly. Mr. Swotcham for the moment had the ear of the house, and he
was speaking rapidly and excitedly in a sort of cracked treble voice,
and apparently endeavouring to tie his fingers into hard knots. They
had been joined by three more disputants whom the Babe conjectured
to be in the running for the Apostles, for the other three evidently
regarded them as promising amateurs rather than professionals.
He made his way across to the window, where he saw Mr. Stewart sitting
with a somewhat isolated air.
“This is a very interesting sight, Babe,” he said, “and I was looking
out for someone to whom I could talk about it. I feel a trifle like St.
Anthony in the desert, with all sorts of half-understood temptations
beckoning to me. On one side I hear the siren voice of philosophy
calling me to leave the world, and live in the realms of pure theory;
on the other side of the table stand three joyous Freshmen in the
heyday of youth and animal spirits drinking whisky and water, and a
fourth, with a temerity which I envy, a curious pink liqueur; on the
right you may observe two members of the Footlights Club, who are
slaves, so they tell each other, to their divine mistress, Art, to whom
they offer sacrificial burlesques twice a year. An archdeacon, with
the face of a mediæval saint from a painted glass window, has just
gone through into the next room, where he will hear a pupil of mine
preaching atheism--”
“I heard someone just now allude to the ‘so-called Resurrection.’”
“The chances are a thousand to one that that was he,” said Stewart.
“Just behind you an Italian is singing the joys of the back streets of
Naples to two tuft-haired absurdities, who are sighing to see a little
‘life.’ Meantime, through the open door I can hear our sub-organist
playing the overture to _Parsifal_. He thinks that if he goes on long
enough and plays loud enough the conversation will get a little lower.
He is wrong. The louder he plays, the louder will everybody talk. In
fact he is laying up for them all a store of sore throats to-morrow
morning. And our host, whose moral digestion most surely resembles that
of an ostrich, turns from one to another, and is appropriate to all.
There was also a member of the Upper House here just now, but he did
not stop. He had mistaken the character of the entertainment and had
come in evening clothes like you, but unlike you had brought his wife
décolletée. His entry was pompous, his exit precipitous. As for you, I
have long ceased to be surprised at anything you do. But do tell me why
you are here?”
The Babe looked round appreciatively.
“I don’t know, I’m sure. I came here because I had been dining at the
T.A.F. in King’s.”
“Ah, purely antidotal,” said Mr. Stewart.
“Not consciously; and I stopped, I suppose, because it amused me.
Surely that is a very good reason.”
“The best of reasons, my dear Babe. And when it ceases to amuse you,
you will go away, and I will come with you. And I came because it
was Sunday, and here one can shake off the impression that it is
Sunday, though I don’t know why one should be able to do so with such
conspicuous success as one does. Somehow in my own rooms everything
looks different on Sunday and in consequence they are hardly habitable.
I suppose it is the influence of heredity: the rooms are accustomed to
generations of dons who always wear black coats on Sundays, and have a
cold lunch. Ah, here is the archdeacon. I suppose he has been getting
his mind out of its Sunday clothes too. Archdeacons are venerable,
are they not? How do you address them, ‘Your Veneration’ or ‘Your
Venerance’? Your uncle is a Dean, is he not, Babe? Don’t you know?”
“I think it’s ‘Your Veneree,’” said the Babe, “on the analogy of
referee. Look, he’s talking to the ‘so-called Resurrection.’”
“Then he is probably learning a thing or two,” said Mr. Stewart. “That
young man never comes to see me without instructing me on the whole
duty of a tutor, which appears to be, to do what one intolerable
undergraduate tells him. For he is intolerable, neither more nor less.
I think I have never met a young man who inspired me with a more
searching abhorrence.”
The Babe looked at his watch.
“I suppose I shall be gated if I don’t go back to Trinity soon,” he
said.
“It is not unlikely. I will come with you. I am drunk with impressions,
and I want a little moral soda-water. As we walk, Babe, you shall speak
to me of Rugby football, and drop kicks. That I hope will restore my
equilibrium. I understand now why you play football; hitherto it has
been a mystery to me. It must be very calming to the moral nature. So
tell me what a Punt is.”
XV.--CLYTEMNESTRISMOS.
Thy warrior comes in regal state,
What words of welcome for him, wife?
The lips of love, the heart of hate,
The bath, the net, the knife.
STORIES OF MYCENÆ.
Between his own tripos work, which he stuck to steadily and grimly,
and found by mere force of routine less disagreeable than he expected,
Rugby football, the storm and stress of social duties, as he called
them--which meant dining out or having people to dinner five nights
out of the seven--and constant rehearsals for the Greek play, the
Babe’s time was very fully taken up. Furthermore, on Mr. Gladstone’s
principle, though otherwise their principles had nothing in common, he
always slept for eight and a half hours every night, and if, as often
happened, he did not go to bed till two, the hours of the morning were
somewhat curtailed. The Babe, however, did not object to this, as the
morning seemed to him the really disagreeable part of the day. There
was something crude and raw about the air until lunch-time, which made
itself felt, whatever one was doing. It was necessary of course to
get through the morning in order to arrive at the afternoon, but the
shorter it was made the better, and by breakfasting late and lunching
early one could make it very short indeed.
He worked at the Greek play with extraordinary zeal and perseverance.
The happy band of directors had begun to see that he knew more about
acting than all the rest of them put together, though one had seen two
hundred and thirty-seven different French plays, mostly improper, and
the Babe was present throughout every rehearsal, sitting in the stalls
when he was not on the stage himself, and making suggestions whenever
they occurred to him. Mr. Mackay, the second stage director, had very
strong and original ideas on the subject of Cassandra, whom he made his
special care, and he had mapped out exceedingly carefully the gestures,
tones, postures, and faces she was to make as the prophetic afflatus
gradually gained possession over her. She was a tall young gentleman
with a most lovely girlish face, and about as much knowledge of the
dramatic art as of the lunar theory. But Mackay was indefatigable in
coaching her. She was to point down with both hands outstretched on
the word “blood”; she was to roll her eyes and stare at the centre of
the fourth row of stalls at the word “Apollo”; she was to make a noise
in her throat resembling gargling on the second “Alas”; she was to
stagger on the third, and palpitate on the fourth. She was to gaze with
agonised questioning at the Ophicleide when Clytemnestra told her she
was mad, as if to ask whether he too agreed with her, and breathe as
if she had just come to the surface after a prolonged dive; and from
that point onwards she was to cast restraint to the winds. She was
mad; let the audience know it. Mad people were incoherent and throaty;
what she said was incoherent, let her mode of saying it be as throaty
as possible. She must continually gargle, gurgle, mule, puke, croak,
creak, hoop, and hawk, and if then she didn’t bring down the house,
well,--the fault was not hers.
Cassandra, who at any rate had a good memory, and did blindly what
she was told to do, had just been through her part with faultless
accuracy, and was a little hoarse after it, and no wonder. She had
screamed, croaked, gurgled, gargled with pitiless precision, and on the
last word she uttered, her voice, by an entirely unrehearsed effort,
had cracked like a banjo string in a hot room. Mackay thought this
particularly effective, and when he heard it was unpremeditated, urged
her to practise it. He patted her on the back as she came off, and
implied that if she acted like that in the performances, they would be
very helpful to Æschylus’s reputation. The other two stage directors,
it is true, had intermittently indulged in unkind laughter during the
performance, but Cassandra had not heard them, and if she had, she
would not have cared.
At the end of the rehearsal the Babe stayed behind for a few moments
to see about his dress, and passing across the stage again on his way
out, found the three stage directors like the King, the Queen, and the
Executioner in _Alice in Wonderland_ in hot discussion. Like Alice, he
was instantly appealed to by all three, and asked to give his opinion
about Cassandra.
“Do you want me to say exactly what I think?” he asked.
“By all means,” said Mackay, confidently.
The Babe hesitated a moment.
“I haven’t criticised Cassandra at all,” he said, “because I understood
she was, so to speak, preserved. Also she is rather slow, and there
would hardly be time for her to learn her part in the way I should
suggest, and it would be a pity to confuse her mind farther. But if you
ask what I think, she only reminds me of a strong young lady battling
for reason against the clutches of delirium tremens.”
The stage director who had seen so many French plays, smiled.
“I said drunk,” he said.
“Drunk, certainly, and also I think beset by the black-beetle visions,”
said the Babe. “I daresay inspiration by Apollo may be like that, but I
am afraid to an English audience it will suggest D. T.”
“I thought she was splendid this morning,” said Mackay.
“Well, I’ve told you what I think,” said the Babe.