Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Mr. Longridge laughed monosyllabically but unkindly.

  “It was very pleasant, very pleasant indeed, but to be Dean brings one into the wrong relation with undergraduates,” said Mr. Stewart. “And talking of music, I had a charming time at Bayreuth last year. We had Parsifal and Tannhâuser and the Meistersingers. Tannhâuser is the most wonderful creation. Like all of us, but more successfully than most, Wagner welds into one harmonious whole, the ugliness of sin and the beauty of holiness.”

  Mr. Longridge — there is no other word — bridled.

  “The beauty of holiness,” continued Mr. Stewart, chewing and masticating his words, so as to get the full flavour out of them, “a human soul capable of anything. Venusberg and Rome are alike interludes to him. He goes on his sublimely humorous way from Venusberg to Elizabeth, from Elizabeth to Venusberg, and neither produces any lasting effect. And how supremely natural the end is! He has left an almond rod at Rome, and because one of the pilgrims, one of a dowdy crew of middle-class pilgrims shows him an almond rod in blossom, he rushes to the conclusion that it is his. How illogical, but how natural! And he who has never had the courage of his opinions either at Venusberg or Rome, is ‘struck of a heap,’ as they say in suburban places, by the flowering almond rod, and instantly gives up the ghost. Maskelyne and Cooke could produce a bundle of flowering almond rods in half the time. We pay five shillings to see them all. Tannhâuser paid his life to see one. He died of joy at the sight of that flowering almond rod. And after all it was only artificial flowers twined round a stick.”

  “Well, of course, if you choose to look at it in that way,” ejaculated Mr. Longridge.

  “My dear Longridge,” said Mr. Stewart very slowly, “there is only one way to look at things, only one way.”

  “Not at all, though you might very fairly say that there was only one man to look at in one way. Quot homines, tot sententiœ.”

  “Dear old Longridge,” said Stewart with unctuous affection.

  “You might just as well say,” continued Mr. Longridge, “that because there are people who are colour-bind, we none of us know green from red.”

  There was perhaps nothing in the world which Mr. Longridge enjoyed so heartily as what he called a good, sharp argument. This usually consisted in his putting forward a great quantity of indefensible and irrelevant propositions himself, and then proceeding to show how indefensible they were: their irrelevancy needed no demonstration. He was a man of mixed mind.

  “Dear old Longridge,” repeated Stewart. “Some people have the misfortune to be born colour-blind, and no doubt in the next world they will be extraordinarily keen-sighted. But until we have finished with this world, and I have not, we can leave colour-blind people altogether out of the question, can we not? In fact, I don’t know how they found their way in. Some things are green, others red, and if you call them by their wrong names, even your own friends must allow that you are no judge of colour.”

  Mr. Longridge who was very nearsighted, seemed disposed to take this personally.

  “But because I differ from you, in toto I may say, that is no proof that I am colour-blind. You might just as well say — well, to take another instance—”

  “To take another instance,’ said Mr. Stewart, “because you are sleepy, that is no reason why I should go to bed. In fact, I will have just a glass more of Chartreuse. What a lovely colour it is. A decadent, abnormal colour, the colour of a spoiled piece of soul-fabric. Yes, quite delicious. I spent a fortnight once in the monastery at Fecamp, full of dear, delightful, ascetic monks. I think they all put boiled peas in their shoes during the day, which must be horribly squashy, but they all drink Chartreuse after dinner, so they end happily. Dear, impossible Charles Kingsley used always to abuse monks — I suppose because he was tinged with asceticism himself. But I fancy there is no real objection to their marrying. Monks marry nuns, I think. How delightful to receive an invitation card—’ Monk and Nun Stewart.’”

  The two other Fellows of King’s had subsided into the background altogether, and were discussing the chances of their various pupils in the next tripos. They had both refused Chartreuse, and took their coffee in a mixture of half and half with hot milk. The integral calculus on one side balanced an exceptional skill at Greek Iambics on the other, and they prattled on politely and innocently. It must be conceded that they felt but little interest in what they were talking about, but their interest on all subjects was diminutive and bird-like. They pecked and hopped away.

  “But he showed me a copy of Iambics the other day,” said one, “with two final Cretics in it.”

  Mr. Stewart caught the last words.

  “What an epigram that ought to make!” he said, smiling broadly and benignly. “The insidious and final Cretic. I see him as a lean, spare man, with a cast in his eye.”

  “It’s merely a false foot in Greek Iambics they are talking of,” said Longridge breathlessly.

  “And a false foot,” continued Stewart, “cunningly concealed by patent leather boots. Thank you, Longridge, the picture is complete. And I have a Victor Hugo class in my room at half-past ten. We are reading Les Misérables — a — a prose epic. I must literally be going.”

  “I should like to see a figurative going,” said Mr. Longridge, spitefully.

  Mr. Stewart turned on him with mild forbearance.

  “You can say you must be going and then stop,” he said. “Good night, good night. A most pleasant evening.”

  There were now only four of them, so at their host’s proposal they settled down to whist. Mr. Longridge enquired eagerly whether it was to be long whist or short whist, but as no one had ever heard of either, it is to be presumed that they played medium, and it is certain they played mediocre whist. Mr. Longridge during the first deal, demonstrated quite conclusively that whist markers could be used either for whist or backgammon or bézique, always supposing you knew how to multiply by ten, or with somewhat less ease for registering the votes in the present election. This latter, however, appeared, as far as it was possible to follow him, to imply a knowledge of how to multiply by thirteen and divide by twenty-nine, a feat which all his hearers, with the exception of the mathematician, were hopelessly incapable of performing. This, however, was no detraction whatever from the abstract value of such a discovery.

  Longridge was partner to Mr. Campbell, one of the hitherto silent guests, and Collins to Currey, who was cursed with the final Cretic pupil. And herein lay the sting of the affair, for Longridge’s studies in whist had got as far as the call for trumps, while his partner’s knowledge was confined to a complete acquaintance with the ordinal value of individual cards. Collins, however, was a sound player, and the only one present, excepting Longridge, who knew what a call for trumps meant. Longridge consequently stripped his hand naked, as it were, for the sole benefit of his adversary. The rest were as Teiresias, struck blind by the sight of five trumps unveiled.

  With his habitual acumen the Dean of Trinity perceived this during the second rubber, and without communicating his discovery, as he was strongly tempted to do, played the higher of two cards instead of the lower so persistently in the first round, in order to deceive his adversary on the right, that before the game was three deals old he had irrevocably revoked. Holding the knave and nine of clubs he played the higher of the two on to the queen third hand, and deceived by his own acuteness supposed he had no more, and trumped the second round. Whereby his adversaries went out, a treble.

  Reggie and Ealing, meantime, had spent a charming evening. Reggie had been pressed not to play the piano after Hall, and, instead, they had played billiards till just before ten, and then gone round to Malcom Street to come down to dessert at the Babe’s dinner party.

  As it was Guy Fawkes’s day, their course, so to speak, was mapped out for them beyond possibility of error, and Reggie had the prospect of being exactly six shillings and eight-pence poorer than he otherwise would have been, at about 10.30 on Monday morning.

  III. — THE BABE.
>
  O bitter world, where one who longs

  To be recorded unforgiven,

  Bewitched and wild, is called a child

  Fit to be seen in any heaven.

  HOTCHPOTCH VERSES.

  THE Babe was a cynical old gentleman of twenty years of age, who played the banjo charmingly. In his less genial moments he spoke querulously of the monotony of the services of the Church of England, and of the hopeless respectability of M. Zola. His particular forte was dinner parties for six, skirt dancing and acting, and the performances of the duties of half-back at Rugby football. His dinner parties were selected with the utmost carelessness, his usual plan being to ask the first five people he met, provided he did not know them too intimately. With a wig of fair hair, hardly any rouge, and an ingénue dress, he was the image of Vesta Collins, and that graceful young lady might have practised before him, as before a mirror. But far the most remarkable point about the Babe, considering his outward appearance and other tastes, was his brilliance as a Rugby football player. He was extraordinarily quick with the ball, his passing was like a beautiful dream, and he dodged, as was universally known, like the devil. It was a sight for sore eyes to see the seraphic, smooth-faced Babe waltzing gaily about among rough-bearded barbarians, pretending to pass and doing nothing of the kind, dropping neatly out of what looked like the middle of the scrimmage, or flickering about in a crowd which seemed to be unable to touch him with a finger.

  Last night the Babe had been completely in his element. His dinner party consisted of a rowing-blue, a man who had been sent down from Oxford, a Dean who was to preach the University sermon next day, and was the Babe’s uncle, Jack Marsden, a gentleman from Corpus, who had a very rosy chance, so said his friends, of representing Cambridge against Oxford at chess, and himself. Later on, Reggie and Ealing had come in, who with the help of the rowing man broke both his sofas; the gentleman from Oxford had insisted, to the obvious discomfort of the Dean, on talking to him about predestination, a subject of which the Dean seemed to know nothing whatever; the chess-man had played bézique with Jack, and the Babe had presided over them all with infantine cynicism. A little later on, when the Dean had gone away, he had danced a skirt-dance in a sheet and a night-gown, and they ended up the evening by what the Babe called “a set piece” from his window, consisting of a Catherine wheel, and four Roman candles, not counting the rocket which exploded backwards through the Babe’s chandelier, narrowly missing the head of the man from Corpus, whose chance of getting his chess-blue would, if it had hit, have been totally extinguished. In order to lend verisimilitude to the proceedings Reggie had gone into the street and called “Oh-h-h-h,” at intervals, and as he had left his cap and gown in the Babe’s room, he was very promptly and properly proctorised.

  The Babe breakfasted next morning at the civilised hour of ten, and observed with a faint smile that the rocket stick was deeply imbedded in the ceiling, and he ate his eggs and bacon with a serene sense of the successful incongruity of his little party the night before. The gentleman from Oxford who was staying with him had not yet appeared, but the Babe waited for no man, when he was hungry.

  The furniture of his rooms was as various and as diverse as his accomplishments. Several of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations from the Yellow Book, clustering round a large photograph of Botticelli’s Primavera, which the Babe had never seen, hung above one of the broken sofas, and in his bookcase several numbers of the Yellow Book, which the Babe declared bitterly had turned grey in a single night, since the former artist had ceased to draw for it, were ranged side by side with Butler’s Analogies, Mr. Sponge’s Sporting Tour, and Miss Marie Corelli’s Barabbas. It is, however, only fair to the Babe to say that Bishop Butler’s volume had been part of the “set piece” for his Littlego, and that he referred to Miss Corelli as the arch humourist of English literature. A pair of dumb-bells, each weighing fifty-six pounds, stood by the fireplace, but these the Babe had never been known to use in order to further his muscular development; he only rolled them over the floor with the patient look of one who had the destinies of the world on his shoulders, whenever the lodger below played the piano. It may be remarked that the two were not on speaking terms.

  “And herein,” said the Babe, when he explained the use of the dumb-bells the evening before, “herein lies half the bitterness of human life.”

  He was pressed to explain further, but only replied sadly, “So near and yet so far,” and showed how it was possible to imitate the experience of a sea-sick passenger on the channel, by means of “that simple, and I may add, delicious fruit, the common orange.” It was a most realistic and spirited performance, and all that the Dean could do was to ejaculate feebly, “Do stop, Babe,” between his spasms of laughter.

  The Babe had finished his breakfast, which he ate with a good appetite, heartily, before the gentleman from Oxford appeared, and proceeded to skim the Sunday Times. When he did appear he looked a little disconsolately at the breakfast table, and lifting up a dish-cover found some cold bacon, at which he blanched visibly, and demanded soda water.

  “What did you eat for breakfast, Babe?” he asked.

  The Babe looked up apologetically.

  “I’m afraid I ate all the eggs, and the bacon must be cold by now,” he said. “But I’ll send for some more.”

  “No thanks. Where’s the tea?”

  The Babe rang the bell.

  “It’ll be here in a moment. I drank cocoa.”

  Leamington finished his soda water, and sat down.

  “There is no end to your greatness. Cocoa! Great Scot! My tongue is the colour of mortar.”

  “I’m so sorry. I feel quite well, thanks. Will you have some Eno’s fruit salts? I know my landlady’s got some, because she offered me them the other day when I had a cold. Here’s your tea. Do you ever read the Pink ‘un? It’s funny without being prudish.”

  Leamington poured out some tea.

  “Don’t read, Babe; it’s unsociable. Talk to me while I eat.”

  The Babe put down the current copy of the Sunday Times, and laid himself out to be pleasant.

  “There are some people coming to lunch at two,” he said. “I rather think I asked Reggie. Poor Reggie, he got dropped on in a minute by the Proggins. Oh, yes, and so is Stewart. Do you know Stewart? He’s a don at Trinity, and is supposed to be wicked. I wish someone would suppose me to be wicked. But I’m beginning to be afraid they never will.”

  “You must lose your look of injured innocence or rather cultivate the injury at the expense of the innocence. Grow a moustache; no one looks battered and world-weary without a moustache.”

  “I can ‘t. I bought some Allen’s Hair Restorer the other day, but it only smarted. I wonder if they made a mistake and gave me Allen’s Antifat?”

  “You don’t look as if they had,” said Leamington, “at least it doesn’t look as if it had had much effect. Wouldn’t it take?”

  “Not a bit,” said the Babe. “I applied it night and morning to my upper lip, and it only smelt and smarted. I suppose you can’t restore a thing that has never existed. I think I shall be a clergyman, because all clergymen cut their moustaches off, and to do that you must have one.”

  “I see. But isn’t that rather elaborate?”

  “No means are elaborate if you desire the end enough,” said the Babe sententiously. “I shall marry too, because married people are bald, and I’m sure I don’t wonder.”

  “So are babies.”

  “Not in the same way, and don’t be personal. I can’t think of any other means of losing the appearance of innocence. Suggest some: you’ve been rusticated.”

  “Why don’t you—”

  “I’ve tried that, and it’s no use.”

  “But you don’t know what I was going to say,” objected Leamington.

  “I know I don’t. But I’ve tried it,” said the wicked Babe. “I’ve even read the Yellow Book through from cover to cover, and as you see, framed the pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. The Ye
llow Book is said to add twenty years per volume to any one’s life. Not at all. It has left me precisely where it found me, whereas, according to that, as I’ve read five volumes, I ought to be, let’s see — five times twenty, plus twenty — a hundred and twenty. I don’t look it, you know. It’s no use your telling me I do, because I don’t. I have no illusions whatever about the matter.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you anything of the kind,” said Leamington. “But you should take yourself more seriously. I believe that is very aging.”

  The Babe opened his eyes in the wildest astonishment.

  “Why I take myself like Gospels and Epistles,” he said. “The fault is that no one else takes me seriously. You would hardly believe,” he continued with some warmth, “that the other night I was proctorised, and that when the Proctor saw who I was — he’s a Trinity man — he said, ‘Oh, it’s only you. Go home at once, Babe.’ It is perfectly disheartening. I offered to let him search me to see whether I had such a thing as a cap or a gown concealed anywhere about me. And the bull-dogs grinned. How can I be a devil of a fellow, if I’m treated like that?”

  “I should have thought a Rugby blue could have insisted on being treated properly.”

  “No, that’s all part of the joke,” shrieked the infuriated Babe. “It’s supposed to add a relish to the silly pointless joke of treating me like a child and calling me ‘Babe.’ I’ve never been called anything but Babe since I can remember. And when I try to be proctorised the very bull-dogs come about me, making mouths at me.”

  “Rough luck. Try it on again.”

  “It’s a pure waste of time,” said the Babe disconsolately. “I might go out for a drive with all the bed-makers of this college in a tandem, and no one would take the slightest notice of me. Besides I can never make a tandem go straight. The leader always turns round and winks at me. It knows perfectly well that I’m only the Babe, bless its heart, I edited a perfectly scandalous magazine here last term you know, every day during the May week. It simply teemed with scurrilous suggestiveness. It insulted directly every one with whom I was acquainted, and many people with whom I was not. It compared the Vice Chancellor to an old toothbrush, and drew a trenchant parallel between the Proctors and the town drainage. It suggested that the antechapel of King’s should be turned into a shooting-gallery, and the side chapels into billiard-rooms.