“If there is time, I should advise her to remodel herself a little. Not
to choke so much; she spits at me like a llama, you know. Not to be so
inspired. There is too much saliva in her madness, I think.”
“My dear fellow,” broke in Mackay, “you miss the whole conception of
the part. She is mad, stark, staring mad.”
“I daresay I’m wrong,” said the Babe.
There was an awkward pause, broken by Mackay who picked up his coat
abruptly.
“Very well,” said he. “Take her in hand yourselves. I must be going. We
rehearse again at five, I think.”
A moment’s silence followed and they all looked at each other with the
air of detected conspirators.
“Will you help us?” asked Dr. Propert at length of the Babe.
“Do you mean, will I coach Cassandra?”
“Yes.”
The Babe hesitated.
“I don’t want to interfere,” he said, “but certainly there is room
for improvement in Cassandra. And I don’t want Mackay to think I am
meddling with him. I would much sooner not.”
“I think Mackay wishes it,” said Propert, “only he didn’t like saying
so.”
The Babe shrugged his shoulders.
“I didn’t gather that from his manner, but if you can assure me of it,
I will do my best with her.”
Dr. Propert heaved a sigh of relief.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth,” he said magnanimously. “We have too
many stage directors. We all of us really want you to manage the whole
thing. Some one will say your part this afternoon--I will myself--if
you will take the rehearsal alone. Besides, the architecture of the
palace is all wrong, and I have found a fifth century statue with
sandals on. There is a cast of it in the Museum, and I must get it
copied. We have our hands too full.”
So that afternoon Dr. Propert read out Clytemnestra’s part, and the
two other stage directors sat meekly in corners, and busied themselves
with sandals, and from the centre of the stalls the Babe issued his
orders, while Dr. Propert read his part in a fine sonorous voice
and in a modern Greek accent, which made the Iambic lines, so said
Mackay, who had made a special study of ancient metres, sound like
minor Galliambics. Cassandra exhibited mild surprise when the Babe
stopped her gurgling, and when he forbade her to ogle the place where
the Ophicleide should be, she felt like an unanchored ship, drifting
helplessly about among quicksands. So the Babe reserved her for private
instruction, and told Agamemnon not to go like Agag.
There was only a fortnight more before the performance, and the
Babe worked like a horse, and like Hans Müller made miracles. The
casual visitor to his rooms was likely to be confronted with a raging
prophetess or a credulous king, in front of whom stood the Babe showing
them how to rage or how to express the extremes of credulity. Dr.
Propert found enough to do in superintending the stage properties and
the second stage director became a sort of benignant elderly Mercury to
the Babe. Mackay alone held slightly aloof.
On the night of the first performance, there was a thick, palpable
atmosphere of nerves abroad, like a London fog. Agamemnon kept
repeating his first line over and over again and wiping his hands on
his himation, and tried to remember that, whatever he did, he must not
clear his throat before he began to speak. The calm and prosy Argive
elders put by their prosiness and became peppery; Dr. Propert flew
about with altar wreaths in his hands, which he deposited carefully
in safe places and then forgot where he had put them. Even the
placid, moon-faced Cassandra pricked her fingers violently with her
fifth-century brooch. As for the watchman it was a serious matter for
doubt whether his shaking knees would ever take him safely down his
somewhat ricketty watch-tower. The Babe alone, on whom really the whole
responsibility as well as the heaviest part rested, towered head and
shoulders above the nervous fog, and was absolutely his own silly self.
He caught up Agamemnon three minutes before the curtain was to rise and
tried to induce him to dance a _pas de quatre_ out of the palace, and
when Agamemnon trembled so that there was imminent risk of the sandals
coming off, let alone dancing, danced a _pas seul_ himself. He set Mr.
Sykes upon the altar and crowned him with roses. He said he couldn’t
remember a word of his part, and proposed to act the execution of Mary
Queen of Scots instead or send the audience empty away. He peeped
through the spy-hole of the curtain and said the conductor hadn’t come,
which sent Dr. Propert flying round to see what had happened, whereas
he had been in his place for ten minutes. In fact, he crowded, as he
said, into five minutes of glorious life, the fatuities of years. The
effect of all this was that the rest of the company were so completely
taken up with deploring his behaviour, that they quite forgot to be
nervous, which was precisely the end which the Babe had in view.
The performance rose to the level of excellence, and Cassandra
maintained it, but Clytemnestra----the pens of the critics failed
before Clytemnestra. They couldn’t, they confessed, do her justice.
She was a creation, a revelation, an incarnation; she was wonderful,
marvellous, stupendous, gorgeous, inimitable, irresistible,
unapproachable, inexplicable. She held the mirror up to Nature, the
κἁτοπτρον up to art, and the _speculum_ up to drama--this was a
little involved, and Dr. Propert is responsible. A shaggy student
from Heidelberg who represented his university, thought she was a
woman, and, heedless of Agamemnon’s doom, fell in love with her on
the spot, and was disposed to take it as a personal insult that the
Babe was of the sex that Nature made him. However, as marriage was out
of the question, he wrote an appreciative article in the Heidelberg
_Mittheilungen_ on Clytemnestrismos (made in Germany), contrasting it
with Agamemnonismos, with a great deal about the standpoint of the
subjective Ego, in the presence of objective archaism. She held the
house, she entranced the audience, she dominated their imaginations;
she tore away the veil of realism from in front of idealism (whatever
that may mean); she gilded Æschylus’s conception, and enriched his
execution. She was Clytemnestra. And then they began all over again
with variations.
Every night at the fall of the curtain, the Babe was called back again
and again, every night the whole house rose at him like one man, and
the florist outside the theatre must have realised a competence for the
rest of his days. It had been a rather dull and uneventful term, the
University wanted something to go mad about, and stark staring mad
it went. If Cambridge had not been in a Christian country, it would
have had a Babe-cult on the spot. His photograph, taken at the great
moment when he came out with “murder beaming from every line of his
countenance” as the _Cambridge Daily News_ finely observed, and slowly
wrung his hands free of the blood that dripped from them, was in half
the shops in the town. For the second time--a unique distinction--he
was in authority in the “Granta,” and the _Cambridge Review_ had a long
article entirely about him, beginning, “It must surely have occurred
to any thoughtful critic.” Night after night the cry of “Speech”--what
could have been less appropriate than that Clytemnestra should make an
English speech after a Greek play?--went up from a crowded house, and
as regularly the Babe bowed and smiled and shook his black-wigged head,
and gracefully declined. Once--it was most indecorous and improper--he
went so far as to whistle to Sykes who was always in attendance, and
made him bark, but otherwise the attempt to get a speech from the Babe
was as unprofitable as trying to get water out of a stone. And his
performance was the more remarkable in that he did not repeat himself
slavishly: acting was an instinct with him, and each night he acted
as his mood prompted him. For instance, his manner of entry after the
murder, changed every night. Once he stood at the palace door quite
silent for nearly a couple of minutes, until Dr. Propert turned quite
pale with the thought that perhaps the prompter might think that he
wanted prompting, and spoil the moment, wiping his hands slowly, and
smiling a ghastly smile at the chorus; once he came out quickly and
threw the axe away from him and plunged into his speech; once, and an
audible horror ran round the house as he did it, he broke into the
silence by a mirthless laugh as he fondled the axe with which he had
done the deed, like a mother nursing her child. In a word, he made it
clear, that Æschylus was a most excellent dramatist, and that he was a
most excellent actor.
XVI.--AFTER LUNCH.
I shall be by the fire, suppose.
BROWNING.
There were only three weeks more to the end of the term, but as soon
as the play was over, the Babe at once settled down again to his
social and historical duties. With December a hard frost had set in,
and football for a time was at a standstill. But next to football as
an after lunch amusement, the Babe preferred above everything else a
warm room, a large chair, and congenial company. With these objects in
view he asked Reggie and Ealing to lunch with him one day, and entirely
refused to go out afterwards. Reggie, who had a sort of traditional
notion that people always went out after lunch, or else they were ill,
was overruled by the Babe, who sent his gyp out to order muffins for
tea, and drew his chair close up to the fire.
[Illustration: KING’S PARADE AND CAIUS COLLEGE.]
“But it’s such a jolly day, Babe,” said Reggie, who was only half
persuaded.
The Babe looked out of the window and shuddered.
“By that you mean that there is a horrid smell of frost in the air,
that the sun looks like a copper plate, and that by walking very
fast and putting on woollen gloves you can get completely warm, with
the exception of the end of your nose. I hate woollen gloves, I hate
walking fast, and I hate the tip of my nose to be cold. I avoid all
these things by sitting by the fire.”
“Fuggy brute.”
“About my being a brute,” said the Babe, “there may be two opinions.
But fuggy, as you call it, I am. I confess it, and I glory in it. At
the same time I’m no fuggier than you. If you had your way you would
go a nasty walk in order to get fuggy. We both want to be fuggy, and I
merely adopt the easiest method of becoming so. Dear Reggie, you are so
very English. You love taking the greatest possible trouble to secure
your object. That is called the Sporting Instinct. Personally I am
not troubled with a sluggish liver, but if I was I should take a pill.
That would not suit English people at all: instead of taking a pill,
they take exercise, purely medicinally, and they always adopt the most
circuitous ways of taking it. What can be a more elaborate method of
guarding against a sluggish liver than spending three thousand pounds
on building a tennis court, which can only be used by two people at a
time?”
“What do you play Rugger for, then?”
“Why, because it is the most expeditious way possible of getting
exercise. You concentrate into an hour the exercise you couldn’t get
under half a day if you went a walk.”
“I have known you get keen about it,” said Reggie. “Was that only
because you admired the expedition with which you were getting
exercise?”
The Babe yawned.
“We’ll change the subject,” he said. “I’ve been asked to your Comby on
the 6th. I don’t know why a college should celebrate the birthday of
their founder by making scurrilous rhymes about each other, but I’m
quite glad that they should, and I have very kindly consented to come.”
“Thanks, awfully,” said Ealing.
“Don’t mention it. But really it’s a very interesting point, as
Longridge would say. You all go to chapel, and they sing ‘Zadok the
priest.’ Then you have a big feed in Hall, and the whole college
assembles together, and they libel each other in decasyllable couplets.
Luckily there’s no rhyme to Babe.”
“There are heaps,” said Reggie precipitously.
“I think none. Talking of Longridge, he is supposed to be perfecting a
plan by which, as you walk up to your door you tread on a spring, and
the door flies open. He says it is so tiresome to open a door when your
hands are full. And his hands always are full.”
“It sounds very pleasant,” said Reggie. “Has he tried it yet?”
“Only once. That time his door was already open, and when he trod on
the spring, it shut with, I believe, quite incredible violence and
knocked all his books out of his hands, besides hurting him very much
and breaking his spectacles. You’d think that would stop him? Not a
bit. He merely rose on the stepping-stone of his dead self to higher
things. It only gave him another new idea. He is going to have a second
spring inside the door, which, when trodden on will shut it again after
you. At least that’s what he means to do, when he is fit to walk about
again. At present he is incapacitated. I went to see him yesterday; his
nose is in splints. I am so glad I haven’t an ingenious mind.”
“I wouldn’t be Longridge’s bed-maker, if I was paid for it.”
“Bed-makers are paid for it,” said the Babe. “Besides, as he truly
says, if you can have a dumb waiter why not have a dumb bed-maker made
of some stronger material?”
“He never said anything of the kind, Babe,” said Ealing.
“My dear chap, he has said lots of things of the kind. You force me to
contradict you. He hardly ever says anything of any other kind.”
“Babe, will you or will you not come out?” demanded Reggie.
“I will not come out. I’m not going to spoil my tea by going for a
horrid walk.”
“I wish you would listen to reason.”
The Babe murmured something inaudible about there being no reason to
listen, but when pressed, confessed that he had been reading the _Green
Carnation_ and it had affected his brains.
But Reggie, following, as the Babe said, “that blind instinct which
makes us Englishmen what we are”--he was taking liberties with the
remarks made by his fellow-guest at the T.A.F.--insisted on going out
and taking Ealing with him, though promising to come back for tea, and
the Babe was left to himself.
He was conscious of feeling a little flat, now that the Greek play was
over, and he half wondered to himself what he had done before it began,
to get through the time. For instance, to-day it was barely half-past
three, he was not going to dine till eight, and he had already done as
much work as he meant to do. He thought bitterly that Dr. Watts had
very much overrated Satan’s powers of invention. The upshot was that
he fell asleep and Reggie and Ealing returning an hour later found him
stewing contentedly in front of the fire.
The Babe was rather cross at being awakened, and he said they smelt
horribly frosty. Also he wished the door to be shut, and he was very
hungry. Why were they so unkind, and what had he done to deserve this?
But the muffins came before long, and the Babe recovered his admirable
serenity under the cheering influence of most of them.
“And though your muffin,” he remarked, “is said to destroy the coats
of the stomach, no such ill effects will be experienced if the patient
takes enough of them. My only misgiving is that I have not taken
enough. And yet I have taken all.”
“How much dinner do you suppose you will be able to eat?” asked Reggie,
who was still gazing incredulously at the empty dish which the Babe had
put on the table close to him.
“As much as Stewart will be kind enough to give me. And his board is
usually plentifully spread. If he asks me to dinner much oftener I
shall feel bound in common gratitude to tell him the truth about my
royal visitor in the Long. I wish I’d had a photograph of the group
taken, Jack really looked too splendid.”
“Jack has the makings of a comedian about him,” said Reggie, “but
just now he’s very serious. There is an epidemic of sapping abroad,
but if it wasn’t sapping, it would probably be influenza, so we can’t
complain. You’re touched with it, Babe, and Jack’s got it badly. I went
to see him yesterday, and he was analysing the second Punic war in a
large square note-book with notes on the Wasps at the other end.”
“I know. And he was quite angry when I ventured to speak
disrespectfully of Hannibal. He called me a funny ass, and implied that
Hannibal was more than a father to him. Also he has taken to red ink
which is one of the worst signs. I went into his room in the dark one
day last week, and upset something. It proved to be a stone bottle of
red ink, rather larger than a ginger-beer bottle and quite full. Also
the cork was out, and after that there was no further need for the
cork. It would have been like locking the stable door when the steed
was spilt--I mean, stolen. I pointed that out to him, for it was surely
consoling to know that no more red ink could be spilt in his rooms,
unless he was rash enough to buy some more, in which case, so to speak,
it would have been on his own head, which would be worse than on the
carpet, but he only murmured, ‘Caius Flaminius Secundus,’ and asked if
I was sitting on his classical dictionary.”
“And were you?”
“I think it turned out that he was. So I called him a sap, and went
away.”
“I hate a sap,” said Reggie with a certain dignity.
“We used to call a sap a groutbags at my private school,” said Ealing.
“Why?”
“I don’t know what else you could call them. I was a groutbags once
myself.”
The Babe yawned.
“I feel rather futile,” he said. “I wanted to be amused, and you
fellows would go for a walk. Let’s play ‘Kiss in the slipper,’ or
something.”
“I hear you played Van John till two this morning,” said Reggie.
The Babe stopped in the middle of his yawn.
“Yes, a little after two, I think. We played Van John and other things.
I lost six pounds. Blow the expense. Do you know Feltham of this
college?”
“No, why?”
“Oh, nothing. He was there, that’s all.”
“Nice chap?”
“Nothing particular. Oh, yes, quite nice, I should think, but he went
away as soon as we shut up playing. I hardly know him--in fact I never
met him before. Hullo, it’s seven. I must go.”
“Where are you going?”
“Only to see a man I know, as the Apostles say. Are either of you
dining with Stewart to-night?”
“Yes, I am,” said Reggie. “At eight, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Be punctual, because I’m so hungry.”
XVII.--A LITTLE GAME.
Whist is slow, but baccarat bites,
Baccarat bites, and we want to be bit;
Late comes dawn on these winter nights,
And you need no knowledge to play at it.
HOTCH-POTCH VERSES.
In all his life for two years and a half at Cambridge, and he had
associated with very many classes there, the Babe had never come across
any man whom he would suspect of being capable of doing that which
necessitated his going to see “the man” he knew on such an errand
as this, and he concluded rightly that though such people no doubt
occurred, they were not to be looked for, with any chance of finding
them, at university towns. His errand was not a pleasant one, and it
was far from being an easy one, and when he knocked at Feltham’s door a
few minutes afterwards, he could not have hazarded the vaguest guess as
to what manner of exit he would make.
The Babe was, unfortunately, strongly possessed by the gambling
instinct, and when the night before a friend of his had come in
after Hall, and proposed whist if they could get a four, the Babe
said that if they were going to play cards, they might as well play
something more amusing than whist, which seemed to him as a peculiarly
unexhilarating mode of enjoying oneself, and which he regarded as a
practical application of unmixed mathematics. If Broxton would raise
two people to play at something more biting than whist, the Babe would
raise two others.
The Babe raised his two without much delay, but Broxton returned with
only one. However, he said he had met a chap called Feltham, who, he
knew, played, and should he see whether he could come?
The Babe would have played cards with old Gooseberry himself, if he
could not get anyone else, so Broxton went off to see whether Feltham
would play, found him in and willing, and they played Van John for a
while, until the Babe began to yawn and complained he had only lost
three and six. Did they know Marmara, which was indifferently called
“Only-a-penny,” chiefly because it dealt with sums usually much larger
than that.
Some of them, and among these was Feltham, did know Marmara, and the
others were willing to learn it. So the Babe, assuring them that no
previous knowledge was required, proceeded to enlighten them. Everyone
placed a small sum, say sixpence, or its equivalent in counters, in the
pool, and the dealer thereupon dealt three cards face downwards all
around, and three to himself. He then turned up the next card, and you
had all your premises.
Thus--if, for instance, the card turned up happened to be a four of
diamonds, each player in turn had to bet, before looking at his three
cards which lay face downwards on the table, whether they contained a
diamond higher than the four. His stake was only limited by the sum
in the pool unless they chose to fix a smaller limit. Thus with the
four turned up, it would probably appear to each player that there was
a fair chance of his holding a higher card of the same suit, and he
would in all likelihood stake pretty well as high as he could. He would
then turn up his cards, and if his hand held a diamond higher than the
four, he would have the pleasure of taking the amount of his stake out
of the pool, if not, the pain of paying into the pool the same sum.
The game, so said the Babe, was amusing, owing to the fact that it was
pure hazard, and also because the pool mounted up in a way that would
seem to the uninitiated simply incredible. An example of this occurred
at the fifth deal. At the beginning of this deal the pool contained
four shillings. The Babe dealt, and turned up the two of spades.
The first player naturally enough went the pool, but his hand very
curiously contained only diamonds, and he paid four shillings into the
pool, thus raising it to eight. Even more naturally, since the first
player had held no spades, the second player again staked the pool.
His hand contained two hearts and a club, and the pool became sixteen
shillings. It would have been midsummer madness in the third player,
who was Broxton, not to stake the pool, and as it was November and he
was perfectly sane, he did so. His hand revealed three splendid hearts,
and the pool rose to thirty-two shillings. The chances were thus
enormously in favour of the fourth player clearing the pool, and he
accordingly staked it. But as he held a diamond and two clubs, he paid
the pool the equivalent of thirty-two shillings, in mean bone counters,
belonging to the Babe. There was nothing left for the fifth player, who
was Feltham, to do but to stake the pool, which he did. His hand, oddly
enough, contained the seven, eight, and nine of clubs, and he remarked
quite unreasonably, as he paid sixty-four shillings into the pool, that
the cards had not been shuffled. Thus the Babe, who had dealt, had a
pool of sixty-four shillings to win or lose. He staked the pool, but
he held one diamond, one club, and the ace of spades, which counted
below the two, and he wrote an I O U for sixty-four shillings, as he
had not got enough counters, and paid it into the pool, remarking that
this was better than whist at three penny points. Then the pool in one
deal had mounted from four shillings, to one hundred and twenty-eight
shillings, and it was obvious that if a similar deal occurred again
now, there would be a very considerable sum in the pool at the end of
it.
The Babe in these matters was, like the Athenians, somewhat
superstitious, and he said cheerfully that it was a mounting pool,
and they would have some amusement. The pool showed by its subsequent
conduct that he was right, and at the end of an hour it held about £50,
about half of which had been contributed by Feltham, whose luck had
been abominable. This, as they were playing at present, might be won by
anybody, since there was no limit to the stakes, and the Babe, with the
best possible motives, since he was the only one present who would not
be somewhat embarrassed by the total loss of his contribution to the
pool, proposed setting a limit, of, say, twenty-five shillings to the
stake. Feltham objected strongly, and the alteration was vetoed.