days, who must have been eighty, and never a night had he spent out of
Cambridge since he came up as an undergraduate. An infidel old lot he
was. Many a time I’ve seen him in the evening, when the worms were come
out on the grass plot, hobbling about and trying to kill them with the
point of his stick. He used to talk to them and make faces at them
and say, ‘Ah, damn you. You haven’t got me yet.’ A queer lot they all
were, not the worms I mean, heh, heh, but the old dons. There were two
others who had been great mathematicians in their time, and they used
to spend their evenings together doing, what do you think? Making paper
boats, sir, which they went and sailed on the Cam next day. They would
start them from the King’s bridge, and sail them down to the willow at
the other end of the lawn. And such quarrels as they had over which
had won! One of them one morning, his name was Jenkinson, if I’m not
mistaken, an old Yorkshireman, got so heated over it,--for he said the
other boat had fouled his, as if they were racing for a cup,--that he
went for the other man, by gad, sir, he went for him, and tried to push
him into the river. But the other--his name was Keggs--was too quick
for him, and stepped out of the way, and head over ears into the river
went Jenkinson himself, being unable to stop himself, sir, by reason of
the impetus he had got up. The river isn’t over deep, there, as you
know, perhaps two feet deep, and he stood up as soon as he could find
his feet and bawled out: ‘Ah misdoot ye’ve drooned me, Keggs.’”
The Babe was delighted.
“Do tell me some more,” he said, when Mr. Moffat had finished laughing
himself, which he did in a silent, internal manner.
“Ah, some of those old fellows did things not quite fit for boys to
hear about. _Maxima reverentia_, eh, Mr. Stewart? But there was an
Irishman, a fellow of Clare too, in my time. I might tell you about
him; he used to live in the rooms above the gate. He had a quarrel with
the Master, and as often as the Master went in and out of the gate,
egad, the old chap would try to spit on his head. If the Master was
out to dinner, he would wait up, sitting in his window till he came
back, be it eleven o’clock or twelve, or later than that. At last the
Master had to put up an umbrella when he walked under the gate of his
own college and then the old fellow would shout out, ‘Come, out o’
that, ye ould divil, and let me get at ye.’ A disreputable old crew
they were!--Ah well, it’s half-past ten. Eleven’s me bedtime, and I
must be going. Good-night to you Mr. Stewart, and many thanks for your
kind hospitality. And good-night to you, sir,” he said turning to the
Babe; “I heard them shout ‘Clytemnestra, good old Clytemnestra,’ after
you all down the street. And you deserved an ovation, sir, you richly
deserved an ovation, and I’m glad you got it.”
After Mr. Moffat’s departure, they settled down again, and Stewart
remarked:
“You’ve made a conquest, Babe. But you behaved abominably during
dinner.”
“I couldn’t help it. I could think of nothing but Miss Moffat. On the
top of that you enquired about his sister. I ask you, what was I to do?”
“You needn’t have danced in the dishes outside,” said Reggie.
“I only danced in the soup, and we’d finished with the soup. And
there’s a soupçon of it on my--”
“Shut up.”
“Pumps,” continued the Babe. “May I have some whisky? Thanks. For what
I’m going to receive. What a funny undergraduate Moffat must have been.”
“I believe he was born like that,” said Stewart. “I know when I came
up, ten years ago, he was just the same. That’s the best of getting old
early: you don’t change any more.”
“That’s one for you, Babe,” remarked Reggie.
“The Babe is the imperishable child,” said Stewart.
“You called me a man of the world the other day,” said the Babe in
self-defence.
“I think not.”
“You did really. However, we’ll pass it over.”
“By the way, Babe, you are corrupting the youth of the college. Two
men went into their lodgings last night at ten minutes past two. It
transpired that they had been playing cards with you.”
“Well, it is true that I was playing cards last night. But they could
have gone away earlier if they had wished.”
“Your fascinations were probably too strong,” said Reggie.
“Now you’re being personal, and possibly sarcastic,” said the Babe with
dignity. “I must go to bed. I was late last night.”
“The night is yet young, Babe,” said Stewart.
“So am I. But if I don’t go, I shall continue to drink whisky and soda,
and smoke.”
“You are welcome. How is the tripos work progressing?”
“Oh, it’s getting on,” said the Babe, hopefully. “A little at a time,
you know, but often. I’m not one of those people who can work five
hours at a stretch.”
“I suppose not. Is it to be a second or a third?”
“I believe there are three classes in the tripos,” said the Babe
stiffly. “You have only mentioned two. Well, yes, perhaps one of your
small cigarettes would not hurt me. But I must go at eleven, because I
am sapping. Oh, isn’t that the _Shop Girl_ on the table? There are some
awfully good songs in it. May I go and get my banjo?”
“Do. I got it expressly for you to sing.”
The Babe slept his usual eight and a half hours that night. He did not
awake till 10.30.
XX.--THE BABE’S MINOR DIVERSIONS.
Where three times slipping from the outside edge
I bumped the ice into three several stars.
TENNYSON.
The frost continued, black and clean, and the Babe, like the Polar
Bear, thought it would be nice to practise skating. He bought himself
a pair of Dowler blades with Mount Charles fittings, which he was
assured by an enthusiastic friend were the only skates with which it
was possible to preserve one’s self-respect, and fondly hoped that
self-respect was a synonym for balance. Hitherto his accomplishments in
this particular line had been limited to what is popularly known as a
little outside edge, but Reggie who was a first-rate skater undertook
his education. The Babe, however, refused to leave his work altogether
alone, for he was beginning to be seriously touched with the sapping
epidemic, and he and Reggie used to set off about one, taking lunch
with them, to the skating club, of which Reggie was a member, and of
which the Babe was not.
Sykes only went with them once, and he would not have gone then, had it
been possible to foresee that he would put skates in the same category
as croquet balls and bathers, but it was soon clear that he did. He
made a bee-line for the unemployed leg of Professor Robertson, who was
conscious of having done the counter rocking turn for the first time in
his life without the semblance of a scrape, and brought him down like a
rabbit shot through the head. The Babe hurried across to the assistance
of the disabled scientist, and dragged Sykes away. But Sykes had his
principles, and as he dared not use threats to the Babe, he implored,
almost commanded him not to put on his skates.
“Sykes, dear, you are a little unreasonable,” said the Babe
pacifically. “Reggie, what are we to do with Sykes? There was nearly
one scientist the less in this naughty world.”
The cab in which they had driven up, was still waiting, and at Reggie’s
suggestion Sykes was put inside and driven back to the stable where he
slept.
The Babe wobbled industriously about, trying to skate large, and not
deceive himself into thinking that a three was finished as soon as he
had made the turn, and Reggie practised by himself round an orange,
waiting for a four to be made up, until the Babe ate it.
About the third day the Babe was hopelessly down with the skating
fever, which went badly with the sapping epidemic. He took his skates
round to King’s in the evening, after skating all day, for the sapping
epidemic was rapidly fleeing from him like a beautiful dream at the
awakening, and skated on the fountain; he slid about his carpet trying
to get his pose right; he put his looking-glass on the floor and
corrected the position of the unemployed foot; he traced grapevines
with a fork on the tablecloth and loops with wineglasses; he dreamed
that he covered a pond with alternate brackets and rocking turns, and
woke up to find it was not true; he even watered the pavement outside
his rooms in order to get a little piece of ice big enough for a turn,
with the only result that the bed-maker, coming in next morning, fell
heavily over it, barking her elbow, and breaking the greater part of
the china she was carrying, which, as the Babe said, was happily not
his. Unfortunately, however, the porter discovered it, as he brought
round letters, and ruthlessly spread salt thickly over it, while the
baffled Babe looked angrily on from the window.
Snow fell after this, and the Babe proposed tobogganing down Market
Hill. He talked it over with Reggie, and they quarrelled as to which
was the top of the hill and which the bottom, “for it would never do,”
said the scrupulous Babe, “to be seen tobogganing up hill,” and on
referring the matter to a third person, it was decided that the hill
was perfectly level, so that they were both right and both wrong,
whichever way you chose to look at the question.
The King’s Comby (which is an abbreviation for Combination and
means Junior Combination Room, but takes place in quite a different
apartment) went off satisfactorily. The Babe, secure in the knowledge
that there was no rhyme to Babe in the English language (his other
name, which I have omitted to mention before, was Arbuthnot, and it
would require an excess of ingenuity to find a rhyme even to that),
made scurrilous allusions, most of them quite unfounded, about his
friends, in vile decasyllables, and enjoyed himself very much. Later
in the evening he with two of the performers in the original play
acted a short skit on the _Agamemnon_, in which he parodied himself
with the most ruthlessly realistic accuracy, and killed Agamemnon in
a sponging tin with the aid of a landing net and a pair of scissors.
Last of all he disgraced himself by stamping out in the snow, in
enormous letters, the initials of a popular and widely known don of the
college, with such thoroughness, that the grass has never grown since,
and the initials are to be seen to this day, to witness if I lie. The
proceedings terminated about three in the morning, and the Babe was
left waiting for some minutes outside the porter’s lodge at Trinity,
while that indignant official got out of bed to open the gate to him.
The Babe ought to have caught a bad cold, but with an indefensible
miscarriage of justice, it was the porter who caught cold, and not he,
and the Babe observed cynically, when he heard of it, that the memory
of the dog in the nursery rhyme, that bit a man from Islington in the
leg, and then died itself, had at last been avenged.
Christmas, the Babe announced, fell early that year, and consequently
he with several others stayed up till Christmas Eve, when they were
allowed to stay no longer. He had gone up to town for two days to play
in the University Rugby match, which he had been largely instrumental
in winning, for the ground was like a buttered ballroom floor, a state
of things which the Babe for some occult reason delighted in, and for
an hour’s space he proceeded to slip and slide and gloom and glance in
a way that seemed to paralyse his opponents, and resulted in Cambridge
winning by two tries and a dropped goal. The dropped goal was the
Babe’s doing: theoretically it had been impossible, for he appeared to
drop it out of the middle of a scrimmage, but it counted just the same,
and he had also secured one of the tries. The _Sportsman_ for December
15th gives a full account of the match; also the Babe’s portrait, in
which he looks like a cross between a forger and a parricide.
On returning to Cambridge, in order to be up to date, he and some
friends went out carol-singing one night, visiting the heads of
colleges, and the houses of the married fellows. The Babe acted as
showman and spoke broad Somersetshire, which interested a certain
philologist, who had no suspicion that they were not town people, very
much. The Babe declared that his father and grandfather had lived in
Barnwell all their lives, and that he himself had never even attempted
to set foot out of Cambridgeshire except once on the August Bank
Holiday, when he had intended to go to Hunstanton but had missed the
train. At this point, however, the philologist winked and said: “Mr.
Arbuthnot, I believe.” They collected in all seventeen shillings and
eightpence, which they settled should be given to a local charity, but
the Babe, as he counted the amount over with trembling, avaricious
fingers, looked up with a brilliant smile as he announced the total and
exclaimed: “Not a penny of that shall the poor ever see.” They also
got what Rudyard Kipling calls “lashings of beer” at several houses,
and Bill Sykes who had been coached to carry a small tin into which
offerings of money were put by the open-handed householder, was without
a shadow of reason filled with so uncontrollable a fit of rage at the
sight of the cook at one of the houses in Selwyn Gardens, who patted
him on the head, and called him a pretty dear, that he dropped the tin
mug, and nipped her shrewdly in the parts about the ankle.
Reggie parted from the Babe at the station, the latter going to London,
and Reggie to Lincolnshire. The Babe travelled first because he said
Sykes refused to go second or third, but that intelligent animal,
poking his nose out from under the seat just as the guard was taking
the tickets, was ignominiously hauled out, and compelled to go in the
van, which cannot be considered as a class at all.
XXI.--A DAY IN THE LENT TERM.
O this drear March month.
KINGSLEY.
Jack Marsden stopped for a moment under the Babe’s window and called
[Illustration: Musical notation: Ba-abe]
and the Babe’s face looked out vindictively.
“If you call me like that I sha’n’t answer,” he said. “You’re not in
Clare.”
So Jack went in, and found the Babe curled up again in a large
chair, close to the fire, working. The month was February, which is
equivalent, at Cambridge, to saying that it was raining--cold, sleety,
impossible rain. As the exact day of the month was the sixteenth, it
followed as a corollary that it had been raining for at least sixteen
days, and, as it was leap year, it would continue to rain thirteen
more.
“Well?” said the Babe unencouragingly. He had gone to bed early the
night before, and the consequent length of the morning made him rather
cross.
“Oh nothing. It’s raining, you know. The _Sportsman_ says that Jupiter
Pluvius is in the ascendant still.”
“He sends the snow in summer,
He sends the frost in May
To nip the apple-blossoms,
And spoil our games of play,”
quoted the Babe.
“Just so, and he doesn’t neglect to send the rain in February. I’ve
just come back from King’s. Reggie’s in a bad temper, almost as bad as
you.”
“Why?”
“Weather, chiefly. He says it would be grovelling flattery to call it
beastly.”
“Reggie is given to making truisms,” said the Babe turning over the
page. “Jack, I wish you’d go away. I want to work. Besides, you’re so
devilish cheerful, and I’m not.”
“Sorry to hear it. Oh, yes, and Reggie told me to remind you that you
are playing tennis with him at twelve. He’s got the New Court.”
The Babe brightened up: there was an hour less of morning.
“Hurrah! that will suit me excellently. Many thanks, and please go
away. Good-bye.”
Stewart confessed that the Babe had surprised him. Most people who knew
the Babe were never surprised at him, because they always expected
him to do something unexpected. But no one had ever supposed that he
would do anything so unexpected as to work steadily every day. It
would not have been so surprising if he had worked twelve hours a day
twice a week, but that he should work four hours every day, upset all
preconceived ideas about him. He had done so for a full month, and
really there seemed no reason now why he should stop. He got up before
nine, and he worked from ten till one: at one he would be himself again
till six, but he would work from six till seven. Stewart considered
this exhibition as a striking imitation by Nature of Mr. R. L.
Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde: he had not clearly realised before that
the Babe had a dual nature. Just now he considered Hyde to be painfully
predominant, for that the Babe should cease being absurd for four hours
a day seemed to him a sacrifice of the best possibilities of his nature.
But the Babe, like Mr. Gladstone in one thing more, threw off all
thoughts of such matters, except during work hours, and having
determined to put in an extra hour in the afternoon, to make up for
tennis in the morning, he trotted off through the dripping, drizzling
rain to the tennis court in the best of spirits.
He went back to lunch with Reggie in King’s Hall and as, contrary to
all precedent, the rain had stopped, they went for a walk afterwards
round two or three football grounds, to see what was going on, and
give Mr. Sykes an airing. Scratch games seemed the order of the day,
and they “took situations” on outside wings opposite each other for a
few minutes in the game on the King’s ground, until Reggie charged
the Babe and knocked him down, after which they retired, dirty, but
invigorated. Then they turned into the tennis court again for a while,
and so by Burrell’s Walk across the town bridge, and back into Trinity
Street, looked in at the shop windows, which are perhaps less alluring
than any others in the kingdom, and admired the preparations for
diverting the sewerage of the town from the Cam.
“But how,” said the Babe, “our college boats will be able to row in a
perfectly empty river bed, is more than I feel fit to tell you.”
“They’ll keep up the water by shutting the locks,” said Reggie, vaguely.
“But no shutting of locks, Reggie, will ever repair the drought caused
by the cessation of the drains. There’s the Master of Trinity. Take off
your hat: he won’t see you. I really wish Sykes wouldn’t always smell
Masters of colleges. It makes them nervous; they think indirectly that
it’s my fault. Bill, you idiot, come here!”
Bill having come to the conclusion that there were not sufficient
grounds to warrant the Master’s arrest, reluctantly dismissed the case,
though he would have liked bail, and trotted after the Babe. The latter
had just discovered that life was not worth living without a minimum
thermometer which he saw in a chemist’s window, and had to go and buy
it.
They passed up to the left of Whewell’s Court, by the churchyard
without a church, and into Jesus Lane in order to deposit Sykes again
at his stables, and then, as tea-time was approaching, turned back
towards Trinity.
“And for our tea,” said the Babe, “we will go to the Pitt, where it
may be had cheaply and comfortably, and we can read the telegrams,
which as far as I have observed, deal exclusively with steeplechase
races, and the state of the money market. I noticed that money was
easier yesterday. I am so glad. It has been terribly difficult lately.
But if it is easier, no doubt the financial crisis between me and my
father, which I expect at the end of this term, will be more capable
of adjustment. At present I fear my creditors will find me like moist
sugar, fourpence the pound. Do you suppose there are any races going
on at Newmarket? We might drive over: I feel as if a little carriage
exercise would do me good. Here’s Jim. Jim always knows about races. He
was born, I mean dropped, at Esher. Jim, is there any racing going on
at Newmarket? Why do you look so disgusted?”
“It’s so likely that flat races should be going on now,” said Jim.
“Oh, well, it can’t be helped,” said the Babe. “What nice brown boots
you’ve got. Have you been out on your gee-gee?”
“Looks rather like it.”
“I thought so,” said the Babe. “We’re going to have tea. Do you know
Reggie? Jim, Reggie, Reggie, Jim.”
“Met before,” said Jim. “Ta, ta, Babe. I’ve got a coach at four.”
The Babe according to custom weighed and measured himself, found as
usual that no change had taken place since yesterday, put his hat on
the head of the bust of Pitt, whence it clattered on to the floor, let
the door into the smoking room swing to in Reggie’s face, and ordered
tea. A group of three or four men before the fire were talking about
someone called Pocohantas, who turned out on enquiry to be a horse, and
the Babe expressed himself willing to lay current odds about anything
in the world.
He and Reggie strolled back in the dusk, and parted at the gate of
Trinity. The Babe went to work till Hall, and after Hall played picquet
with Anstruther, whom he fleeced, capotting him once and repiquing him
twice in an hour, and discussed with him the extraordinary dulness of
the Lent term, and the impossibility of making it any livelier.
“It’s a sort of close time,” said the Babe, “for things of interest.
I don’t know why it should be so, but every day is exactly like every
other day, and they are all dull. I feel eclipsed all the Lent term.
I make a show of gaiety, but it is all hollow. I suppose really one
does depend a good deal on things like cricket and football, and fine
weather. One doesn’t know it at the time, but one misses them when they
are not there.”
“You’ve taken to sapping: you oughtn’t to mind.”
“On the contrary I mind all the more. When I’ve done a morning’s work,
I come out fizzing with being corked up so long, and nothing happens to
my fizz. It loses itself in the empty and infinite air.”
“Don’t be poetical, Babe.”
“For instance,” continued the Babe, “what am I to do now? I’ve had
enough picquet, and I’ve got nothing to say, and I’ve worked enough,
and I don’t want to go to bed.”
“All right, don’t go to bed. Sit and talk to me.”
“But I don’t want to talk,” said the Babe volubly. “There’s nothing
to talk about. I’ve played tennis, I’ve worked, I’ve taken Sykes for
a walk, and that’s all. Really one must be extraordinarily clever to
be able to talk day after day all one’s life. How does one do it? _A
priori_, one would expect to have said all the things one has got to
say by the time one was twenty, and I’m twenty-one. Yet I am not dumb
yet. One doesn’t talk about things that happen, and most people, and I
am one myself, never think at all, so they can’t talk about what they
are thinking about. Give me some whisky and soda; perhaps, as Mulvaney
says, it will put a thought into me. I hate Mulvaney worse than I hate
Learoyd, and that is worse than I hate Ortheris. As for Mrs. Hawksbee,
that’s another story. Soda is like a solution of pin points. It
pricks one all over the mouth. I wonder if it would do as well to put
ordinary pins into water. I shall ask Longridge what he thinks about
it. Now he’s an exception, he does nothing but think; you can hear the
machinery clicking inside him. He thinks about all the ingenious things
he’s going to do and all the ingenious things nobody else would think
of doing. They don’t come off mostly, because the door hits him in
the face, or the gum won’t stick. Thanks. When! Do you know Stewart
is beginning to think I shall get through the tripos, and he warned
me not to work too much. He says that I shall, by all precedents in
such matters, get brain fever and consumption, and that my sorrowing
friends will kneel round my expiring bedside--you see what I mean--on
the morning the tripos lists are announced and shout out above the
increasing clamour of my death rattle, ‘You are Senior Historian,’ and
that my reform from the wild young spark to the pale emaciated student,
will all date from one evening last year at the Savoy, when he said
he would only take the longest odds if he had to bet on my getting
through.”
“And did you give him long odds?”
“No: I wouldn’t have bet against myself even then, for the simple
reason that one never knows how much one can try until one has tried.
If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will believe in you. Not
that I do believe in myself for a moment, any more than I believe in,
in anybody else. You see, six months ago I shouldn’t have believed
it possible that I should work steadily four hours or more a day. I
think I shall take to spectacles, and go for grinds on the Grantchester
road; I believe that’s the _chic_ thing to do in sapping circles. Fancy
waking up some morning to find oneself in a sapping circle. I wonder
what Saps think about.”
“Sap, probably. Oh, yes, certainly sap. Either Thucydides, or binomial
theories, or is it theorems or aortas. Babe, let us meditate on aortas
for a time.”
“By all means. I wonder what an aorta is. Yes, thanks, but only a
mouthful, as Reggie says. That’s because he has such a big mouth. I
say, I wish I had an object in life: it must be so interesting.”
“Liver,” said Anstruther brutally, “take a pill. What do you want an
object in life for?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It would be something to play about with, when one
didn’t want to talk or see other people. I suppose a conscience would
do as well. I haven’t either.”
“You said ten minutes ago that you didn’t want to talk. Since then I
have only been able to get in an occasional word edgewise.”
The Babe laughed, and finished his whisky.
“Yes, I’m very sorry. It’s a great misfortune not to be able to be
silent. It’s not my fault. I sha’n’t take a pill; I shall go to bed
instead. I always used to think that ‘the grave as little as my bed’
was an independent sentence and meant literally what it said. Not that
it meant much. Do you ever lie awake?”
“No, of course not: I can understand the difficulty of keeping awake,
but not of going to sleep.”
“I lay awake nearly five minutes last night,” said the Babe, “and so I
thought I was going to be ill! But I wasn’t, at least not at present. I
suppose people who lie awake, think.”
“I always fancied they only swore.”
“In that case there would be nothing gained. I’m getting silly.
Good-night.”
XXII.--BEFORE THE TRIPOS.