by A. A. Milne
4
It was in the first week of the following term that I opened unsuspiciously a letter addressed to The Editor of The Granta. It was from R. C. Lehmann, its founder and ex-editor, and now for some years on the staff of Punch. He asked for the name of the author of a certain series of dialogues, ‘of which I and many others in London have a very high opinion,’ in the hope that, if it interested him, ‘work of a similar nature might be put in his way.’ I gave him my name.
The undergraduate of to-day will find it difficult to appreciate the thrill which I received from this letter. It must be remembered that in those days there was no ‘popular press’ to keep the Universities ‘in the news.’ Undergraduates were not asked to tell a million suburban readers what was wrong with Oxford, or why they had decided to give up religion. They only came into the London eye on Boat Race night, when it was the magistrate who told them what was wrong and what they should give up. London was not interested to know ‘what the young man of to-day is thinking.’ Youth, no doubt, would be served, but custom demanded that it should be served last. When it had a beard and was more than a youth, then let beards be wagged.
I had no beard; I was twenty and very young for that; but ‘people in London’ were talking about me. I was thrilled. There was only one person to whom I could communicate, and with whom share, that thrill. I wrote at once to Ken.
How easy I have found it to go through the world making on equal terms friends, acquaintances, enemies, and to have the persistent feeling that the only side of the equation which matters is my own. I meet Smith, I like Smith; that is all there is about Smith. I meet Jones, I detest Jones; that goes for Jones. What do they, in return, feel about me? That is their own concern. But for some reason which I cannot explain I assume that their feelings are not so definite as mine, nor so well considered. Is this because they feel less deeply than I or because I am less worth consideration than they? I have never answered that question. The answer lies in the usual tangle of superiority complex, inferiority complexes, conceits, modesties, mock-modesties and vanities of which modern man is composed.
Through the rivalries of our childhood and boyhood I had tried to be ‘nice about it’ to Ken. It did not occur to me that he was trying, with complete success, to be nice about it to me. He was nice without effort, simply because he was not so interested in our rivalry as I, because (I could almost persuade myself) he didn’t even know that we were rivals, and that I had beaten him again. How could it be a humiliation to him who showed no signs of being humiliated? All these little ‘victories’ and ‘defeats’ meant no more to Ken than the winning or losing a game of beggar-my-neighbour.
I was wrong. He wrote now to congratulate me. No friend could have been more honestly delighted, no lover have paid more reckless compliments. And then for the first time he brought our rivalry into the light, showing what it had meant to him from those earliest days until now:
Whatever I did, you did a little better or a little sooner . . . And so it went on. Even after all this, I could still tell myself that I had one thing left. I should always be the writer of the family and now you have taken that too. Well, damn you, I suppose I must forgive you. My head is bloody but unbowed. I have got a new frock coat and you can go to the devil. Yours stiffly, KEN.
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add
Jenny kissed me.
Throughout his life I never lost Ken, nor he me. Time, you thief, who love to get sweets into your list, put that in.
5
The immediate result of Rudie Lehmann’s letter was the suggestion that I should write a series of sketches for Punch. Obviously this could not be attempted until term was over, but it was attempted then with discouraging results. Nobody had said to me, looking at a copy of Punch, ‘You ought to edit that one day,’ and if anybody had, I should undoubtedly have answered ‘I will.’ But there seemed to be many ways of editing a paper. This series of half-a-dozen articles went backwards and forwards between me and the Assistant Editor, Owen Seaman, for some weeks, until at last they were all to his liking. They reached the editor, Burnand, at the beginning of October. Nothing more was heard of them until May, when I made apologetic enquiries of Rudie. He wrote to Burnand, who replied that he had been very busy with his autobiography lately, and hadn’t had time to give them the anxious consideration which they deserved, but that he would be going down to Ramsgate for the week-end and hoped to be able to read them in the train. Rudie waited another month or two (Burnand having met a friend in the train), and then got them away from him, and sent them to a paper called John Bull which had just been started as a ‘rival to Punch.’ This editorship seemed to be in more lively hands, for the series was accepted at once; but the financial arrangements were equally volatile, and the paper went bankrupt at once. Whether before or after the first of my articles appeared I never discovered.
But at the moment the whole of this was hidden from me. I was beginning a second term’s editorship of The Granta, and I was about a hundred hours down on my mathematical time-table. So, reluctantly but, as it proved, wisely, I installed a co-editor, Vere Hodge, and made him do all the work which I didn’t like. Editorials flowed from his pen as they had never flowed from mine. There was no space, of whatever length or breadth, which he could not turn to print. Between us we covered the paper. I wrote whatever I wanted to write, or could reasonably find time to write, and left him to fill up. Probably he thought that he was writing what he wanted to write, and leaving the blank spaces to me. It didn’t matter. We worked happily together and the space was filled. There was a faint aroma of culture about us now, Hodge being a Classical scholar.
6
Ken and I went to the Lakes together in August, staying at a farm-house at Seathwaite. We had decided to do a little rock-climbing. We knew nothing about it, but had brought a rope, nailed boots, and the standard book by Owen Glynne Jones. The climbs in this book were graded under such headings as Easy, Medium, Moderately Stiff, and Extremely Stiff. We decided to start with a moderately stiff one, and chose the Napes Needle on Great Gable, whose charm is that on a post-card it looks Extremely Stiff. Detached by the hands of a good photographer from its context, it becomes a towering pinnacle rising a thousand feet above the abyss. Roped together, since it seemed to be the etiquette, Ken and I would scale this mighty pinnacle, and send post-cards to the family.
We were a little shy about the rope when we started out, carrying it lightly over the arm at first as if we had just found it and were looking for its owner . . . and then more grimly over the other arm, as one who makes for a well down which some wanderer has fallen. The important thing was not to be mistaken for what we were: two novices who had been assured that a rope made climbing less dangerous, when, in fact, they were convinced that it would make climbing very much more so. There was also the question of difficulty. To get ourselves to the top of the Needle would be moderately stiff; but it was (surely) extremely stiff to expect us to drag a rope up there too. I felt all this more keenly than Ken because it had already been decided, anyhow by myself, that I was to ‘lead.’ Not only had I won the Gymnastics Competition Under 14 in 1892, but compared with Ken’s my life was now of no value. Ken had just got engaged to be married. If I led, we might both be killed (as seemed likely with this rope) or I might be killed alone, but it was impossible that I should ever be breaking the news to his lady of an accident which I had callously survived. I was glad of this, of course; but I should have liked it better if it had been I who was engaged and Ken who was being glad.
We scrambled up the lower slopes of Great Gable and reached the foot of the Needle. Seen close it was a large splin
ter of rock about sixty feet high, shaped like an acute angled pyramid with a small piece of the top cut off; leaving a flat summit which could just take Ken and me and (we supposed) the rope. We had practised tying ourselves on, and we now tied ourselves on. I have told how Ken kissed me once, but on this occasion we didn’t even shake hands. I just started up, dragging the rope behind me.
The Napes Needle has this advantage over, from what I hear, the Matterhorn: that the difficult part is not really dangerous and the dangerous part is not really difficult. The dangerous part, as one would expect, comes at the top. One begins by forcing oneself diagonally up a flat slab of rock, the left leg, from knee to ankle, wedged in a crack, and the rest of oneself free as a trolley-bus to follow the left leg upwards. Only the re-assurance of the book, as shouted up to me by Ken, that this though difficult was not dangerous, kept me at it. No doubt my leg was jambed—no doubt about it, as I found when I tried to move it; no doubt I couldn’t roll down the mountain without it; but the rest of my body felt horribly defenceless, and every nerve in it was saying ‘This is silly, and one should stick to Essex.’ With a sudden jerk which made all that the book said ridiculous, I loosened my leg and got it in a little higher up. The very slave of circumstance and impulse, like Sardanapalus, ‘borne away with every breath’ a little farther from Ken (which meant twice as far to fall) I puffed on . . . until a moment came when I could go no farther. Knee still in crack, heart still in mouth, body still in vacuo, I sidled backward to Ken.
‘It’s no good. Sorry.’
‘Were you really stuck?’
‘Absolutely. There’s more in this than we thought.’
‘Shall I try?’
At some other time I might have said: ‘My dear man, if I can’t, you can’t.’ At some other time I might have said: ‘for Maud’s sake, no!’ At this time I said ‘Yes, do.’ I wanted to lie down.
In a little while he was back with me, and we were studying the Easy group.
‘All the same,’ said Ken, looking up at the Needle again.
‘All the same,’ said I.
‘Think of Bruce.’
‘I think of nothing else.’
‘Say “I can do it”.’
‘I can do it.’
We got up.
‘Suppose I came up behind you and pushed a bit?’
‘What’s the rope doing?’
‘Hanging about.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Well, I don’t see what else it can do.’
‘Nor do I. I don’t like the look of the dangerous bit at the top, do you?’
‘It may look better when we get there.’
‘Yes. Well, let’s get there. Dash it, we can’t just carry the rope home again. Come on.’
It was a little easier this time. I felt more like a tram and less like a bus; I got to the sticking-place and waited for Ken’s hand to reach my foot. With its support I straightened my knee and got a handhold higher up. We went on doing this until Ken had reached the sticky place by which time I was in sight of home. Soon we were sitting side by side on a broad shelf, puffing happily. The difficult part was over.
There remained a vertical slab of rock in the shape of the lower four-fifths of an isosceles triangle. It was about fifteen feet high, and there was a ledge like a narrow mantelpiece halfway up. Owen Glynne Jones (who may have been a nuisance in the home) made a practice of pulling myself on to mantelpieces by the fingers, so as to keep in training, and no doubt it is in the repertory of every real climber. We were merely a couple of tourists. When in doubt we collaborated. Ken reached up to the ledge and grasped it firmly, and I climbed up him. When I was standing on the ledge, my fingers were a couple of feet below the top.
In making these climbs it is impossible to lose the way. Every vital handhold is registered in the books, every foothold scored by the nails of previous climbers. To get to the top I wanted one more foothold and one handhold and I knew where they were. I shuffled to the left and looked round the corner.
On the precipitous left-hand face of the pyramid, a little out of reach, there was an excrescence of rock the size and shape of half a cricket-ball. That was the handhold. Just within reach of raised foot and bent knee a piece of the rock sloped out for a moment at an angle of 45°, before resuming the perpendicular. That was the foothold. I should imagine that the whole charm of the Napes Needle to an enthusiast rests on that forbidding foothold. To a non-enthusiast, as I was at that moment, the whole charm of a foothold is that it holds the foot solidly, at right angles to whatever one is climbing up. This didn’t. Could one’s nails (and Jones) be trusted? When all one’s weight was on that slippery-looking, nail-scratched slope, while one grabbed for the cricket-ball, did one simply disappear down the left-hand face, leaving Ken with a lot of rope and no brother, or did one’s head appear triumphantly over the top? That was the question, and there was only one way of finding the answer. After all, there must be something in this rope business, or people wouldn’t carry them about. If I fell, I could only fall thirty feet. It was absurd to suppose that I should then break in half; there was no record of anyone having broken in half; no, I should simply dangle for a little, assure Ken’s anxious head that all that blood he saw everywhere was only where I had hit myself on the way down, and then climb gaily up the rope to safety. All this was just the give-and-take of the climber’s life. All those scratches were just signs of where other people had slipped, disappeared, and come laughing back. Without the rope one would be a dead man, but with it the whole climb was child’s play . . . Or just plain folly?
Oh, well . . .
It was delightful to sit on the top of the Needle and dangle our legs, and think ‘We’ve done it.’ About once every ten years it comes back to me that, in addition to all the things I can’t do and haven’t done, I have climbed the Napes Needle. So have thousands of other people. But they, probably, knew something about it.
A few days later we climbed Kern Knotts Chimney. My ideal reader of this book would be somebody just sufficiently acquainted with the subject to think that by Kern Knotts Chimney I mean Kern Knotts Crack. If I had climbed the Crack this would have been a different sort of book. The Chimney is only moderately stiff. Blocking the top of the actual chimney, which is the second stage of the climb, is a large rocking-stone. Somehow this has to be surmounted. Our faith in Jones was now such as to—I was going to say ‘to move mountains’ but that would be an unfortunate metaphor. It was this bit of the mountain which was not going to move, according to Jones, and we trusted him. But it wobbled alarmingly. There is a technique of chimney-climbing which we didn’t seem to have mastered. We had a fireside discussion as to whether it would be bad form to throw the rope over this boulder and haul ourselves up by it.
‘Good heavens, you can do what you like with the rope,’ said Ken. ‘That’s what it’s for.’
‘Then if you had a lasso and lassoed the top of the Monument and climbed up, you could say you had climbed the Monument?’
‘That’s absurd. You might as well say—’
‘What?’
‘Almost anything,’ said Ken, thinking hard.
‘Such as?’
‘Well, you’ll admit that you can stand on the other man’s shoulders? That’s quite fair?’
‘Of course. But a rope—’
‘Then if you had a friend 475 feet high and you climbed up his braces and stood on his shoulders—’
‘Oh, shut up. Give us the rope.’
We reached the top. It may be things like this which get you blackballed for the Alpine Club. I wouldn’t know.
7
My last year at Cambridge was sacrificed to the Mathematical Tripos. The sacrifice was in vain. I had hoped that I might just get a Second, but it was not to be. As I wrote later, summing up my life:
The work we did was rarely reckoned
Worthy a
Tutor’s kindly word,
For when I said we got a Second,
I really meant we got a Third . . .
It sounds well to say that one has got an Honours Degree; it looks well to write B.A. (Maths. Honours) after one’s name; to a maiden aunt one can explain how well her nephew has done. But one cannot explain a Third Class to one’s father. Father was so bitterly disappointed that for a week he did not talk to me. When I mentioned this the other day to a young friend who was waiting anxiously for the result of his Tripos, he said enviously: ‘Good lord, I wish I could be sure that my father wouldn’t talk to me for a week.’ But in our family we dreaded Father’s unhappy silences much more than we dreaded his anger.
When he was ready to talk to me again, we discussed the future. Was there any chance now of my passing into the Civil Service? I didn’t see why not? Well, I had better begin thinking about it. So I went to London and called upon Wrens’–who, with one or two ‘n’s,’ I cannot now remember, did then, and perhaps still do, specialize in coaching for Civil Service examinations. I told them what I knew, which didn’t sound much, and was advised to supplement my now rather blown-upon knowledge of mathematics with a knowledge of History. I bought a very light book on Constitutional History and took it with me every morning to the bandstand on the Westgate front. Lying in a deck-chair, I studied Constitutional History to the dreamy rhythm of the Blue Danube Waltz. Below, the sea broke gently on a highly respectable beach. It was very peaceful. . . .
I had been happy at Cambridge, and I had edited The Granta. The only cloud over my happiness had been the Tripos. If I never did examinations again, then I could go on being happy. I turned over another page of history and closed my eyes. Somehow I didn’t see myself getting into the Civil Service.
FREE-LANCE
1903–1906
Chapter Ten
I