by E. F. Benson
But Bill, like Gallio, cared for none of those things. He knew perfectly well that they were going to pass the town bathing-place very shortly, and after half a mile or so more of uninteresting river, the University bathing-place. The Babe had taken him up here once when he had bathed himself, and though Mr. Sykes realised that he must not bite his master, whatever foolish and ungentlemanly thing he chose to do, he was very cold and reserved to him afterwards. But he meant to behave exactly as he pleased at the town bathing-place, and a hundred yards before they got there, he was standing in the bow of the boat, uttering short malignant growls. The Babe, however, pulled him back by the tail, and muffled him up in four towels, and Mr. Sykes rolled about the bottom of the boat, and from within the towels came sounds of deep dissatisfaction just as if there were a discontented bull-pup in the middle of them.
Beyond the town bathing-place stands a detached garden, with bright flower-beds cut out in a lawn of short green turf.
Here the Babe conceived a violent desire to land and have tea, which he was not permitted to do; and above that runs a stretch of river, very properly known as Paradise, seeing which the Babe had a fit of rusticity and said he would go no farther, but live evermore under the trees with Mr. Sykes, and grow a honey-coloured beard. He would encamp under the open sky, and on fine afternoons would be seen sitting on the river bank dabbling his feet in the water, and playing on a rustic pipe made of reeds. He would keep a hen and a cow and a bed of strawberries, and it should be always a summer afternoon. Indeed, had not a water-rat been seen at the moment, which compelled him to throw Mr. Sykes overboard to see whether he could catch it, — which he could not — there is no knowing what developments this rustic phase would have undergone. So they went slowly on, making a small detour up to the Granchester Mill, where the water came hurrying out cool and foamy, and where the Babe asked an elderly man, who was fishing intently on the bank, whether he had had any bites, which seemed to infuriate him strangely, for he was fishing with a fly; drifted down again under a big chestnut tree, all covered with pyramids of white blossoms, and turned up the left arm of the river. The water was shallower here, and now and then gravelly shoals appeared above the surface. They frequently ran aground, and made no less than three futile attempts to get round a sharp corner, where the stream running swiftly took the nose of the boat into the bank, and the Babe swore gently at them all, and told them to mark the finish, and get their hands away.
A long lane of quiet shallow water leads to the tail of the pool, and here the river spreads out into a broad deep basin. Grey sluice gates, flanked with red brick form the head of it, and on one side stretches out a green meadow, on the other there rises out of an undergrowth of hazel and hemlock, a copse of tall trees, where the nightingales always omit to sing. They ran the boat in at the edge of the copse, and Reggie lighted the spirit lamp to boil the kettle for tea, while the Babe tied up Mr. Sykes, lest he should forget himself at the sight of four bathers.
Among sensuous pleasures, bathing on a hot day stands alone, and Byron’s Pool is in the first flight of bathing places. There are some who prefer Romney Weir, and say that bathing is nought unless you plunge into a soda water of bubbles; some think that the essence of bathing is a mere pickling of the human form in brine, and are not happy except in the sea; to others the joie de baigner consists of flashing through the air much as M. Doré has pictured Satan falling down from Heaven. But in Byron’s Pool the reflective, or what we may call the garden bather is well off. He has clean water deep to the edge, a grassy slope shadowed by trees to dry on, and a boat to take a header from. Even Mr. Stevenson, a precisian in these matters, would allow “that the imagination takes a share in such a cleansing.” And by the time they were dressed, the kettle was boiling, and Fortune smiled on them.
The Babe refused, however, to stir before he had drunk four cups of tea, and in consequence the kettle had to be boiled again.
“Besides,” said he, “Mr. Sykes hasn’t had his second cup.”
It was generally felt that this was more important than the Babe’s fourth cup, and Reggie filled the kettle.
“The Babe’s pensive,” he said, “What is it, Babe?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get pensive on fine days or on wet evenings, but it doesn’t usually last long. I think I want to fall in love.”
“Well it’s May week next week.”
“One is always supposed to fall in love with each others sisters in May week,” remarked the Babe with a fine disregard of grammar. “But the sisters either die of consumption or else the Dean snaps them up, and so it doesn’t come off. Besides one so seldom does what one is supposed to do.”
“Not often. Byron was supposed to bathe here for instance, and you are supposed to be in by ten to-night, Babe.”
“Napoleon said—” began the Babe.
“Dry up. Why did they gate you?”
“For repeated warnings, I believe. I never asked them to warn me. They go and warn me,” said the Babe, getting a little shrill, “and then they go and gate me for it. I have been allowed no voice whatever in the matter.”
“What did they warn you about?”
“Oh, it was Bill and the bicycle between them, and the time, and the place. Life is a sad business, and mine is a hard lot.”
“You are a bad lot,” suggested Jack.
“Jack, for God’s sake don’t be funny,” said Ealing.
“I thought the Babe wanted a little cheering up. I know he likes being called a bad lot. He isn’t really.”
“It is quite true,” said the Babe in a hollow voice. “I have tried to go to the devil, and I can’t. It is the most tedious process. Virtue and simplicity are stamped on my face and my nature. I am like Queen Elizabeth. I was really cut out to be a milkmaid. I don’t want to get drunk, or to cultivate the lower female. The more wine I drink, the sleepier I get; I have to pinch myself to keep awake, and I should be sleeping like a dead pig long before I got the least intoxicated. Even then if you woke me up I could say the most difficult words like Ranjitsinghi without the least incoherence. And as for the lower female — well, I had to wait at the station the other day for half an hour, so I thought it was a good opportunity to talk to the barmaid at the refreshment room. So I ordered a whiskey and soda and called her ‘Miss.’ I did indeed.”
“What a wicked Babe.”
“I did call her Miss. ‘Miss,’ I tell you,” shouted the Babe. “Then I said it was a beautiful day, and she said ‘Yes, dear.’ She called me ‘dear,’ and I submitted. I didn’t throw the whiskey and soda at her, I didn’t call for help or give her in charge. I determined to go through with it. She was a mass of well-matured charms, and she breathed heavily through her nose. Round her neck she had a massive silver locket on with ‘Pizgah,’ or ‘Kibroth Hataavah,’ or ‘Jehovah Nisi’ upon it.”
“Decree Nisi,” suggested Ealing.
“She looked affectionately at me,” continued the Babe, “and a cold shudder ran through me. She asked me if I would treat her to a glass of port, port, at a quarter-past four in the afternoon. I said, ‘By all means,’ and she pulled a sort of lever, the kind of thing you put a train into a siding with, and out came port, which she drank. Then she said smilingly, ‘ ‘Aven’t seen you for a long time,’ which was quite true, as I’d never set foot in the place before, and she won’t see me again for an equally long time. I waited there ten minutes, ten whole ghastly minutes, and the words froze on my tongue, and the thoughts in my brain. For the life of me I could not think of another thing to say. She continued to smile at me all the time. She smiled for ten minutes without stopping. And so we parted. The kettle is boiling, Reggie.” The Babe mixed Mr. Sykes’s second cup for him and drank his fourth.
“It is no use,” he said. “I am irredeemably silly, and I have no other characteristic whatever. My golden youth is slipping from me in the meantime.” Reggie shouted.
“The Babe thinks he is growing old.
We don’t agree with him. Of c
ourse he is old in everything else, but not in years. Babe, if you ‘re ready we’ll go on. We’ve got to haul the boat over here.
The Babe jumped up with sudden alacrity. —
“All right. Mr. Sykes and I will get out. We shall only be in the way. Come on, Bill.”
“No, Babe,” said Jack, “you shirked before. You shall at least carry the hampers.”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said the Babe with dignity, and on this point he was quite polite but perfectly firm.
They rowed a mile or so farther up, and the Babe selected a suitable place for dinner, at the edge of a hayfield and under a willow tree, and a smile of kind indulgence towards the world in general began to overscore his fruitless regrets of the afternoon. It was after eight when they began dinner, and the Babe’s commissariat was plentiful and elaborate. The only dish that failed to give satisfaction was the toasted cheese with which he insisted they should finish dinner. It was made in the tea kettle, and when melted, poured out through the spout on to biscuits. Mr. Sykes and the Babe alone attempted to eat it, and Mr. Sykes who ate less than the Babe was excessively unwell shortly afterwards.
“But for that,” said the Babe, drinking Chartreuse out of a tea-cup, “I blame the lobster.”
The moon, as big as a bandbox, was just rising clear of the trees, and the Babe produced cigars.
“For mine,” he said, “is one of those rare, generous natures that does unto others what it would not do unto itself. It all comes in the catechism. I will thank any one for a simple paper cigarette.”
“Speech,” said Ealing. “As Stewart.”
The Babe bowed, and began, drawling out his words in a low, slow, musical voice.
“Mr. Sykes and gentlemen,” he said, “the May week is upon us, and we, like the Cambridge Review, are at the end of another year of University life and thought. Some of us — most of us in fact, have experienced for two years the widening influence and varied duties which are inseparable from the minds of any of those who embark upon the harvest of University curriculum with any earnestness of purpose, or seriousness of aim. I think, in fact, I am right in believing that my friend Mr. Reginald Bristow alone — to continue a few of my less mixed metaphors — has put out only a year’s space upon the sea of those special features, which mark the career and are the hinge of the prospects of those miners after perfectly useless knowledge who seek to increase their general ignorance among the purlieus of Alma Mater. Some of us have failed in attaining the objects of our various ambitions, and I am happy to say that none of us have really tried to do so. We have none of us gone to the devil, and he with characteristic exclusiveness has kept aloof from us all. [Cheers] We none of us play cricket for the University, though I once knew a man who got his extra square at chess; he was a dear boy, but he is dead now, and there is not the slightest fear that anything will prevent us from being unable to fail in obtaining a very respectable place in our Triposes. Yes, the May week, which occurs in June and lasts a fortnight, spoken of, I may say sung of in the pages of the Junior Dean and The Fellow of Trinity, is upon us. Personally I detest the May week and I am subscribing to the Grace testimonial fund simply and solely because I abhor the boat procession, but before long our stately chapels and storied urns [cheers] will echo to the sound of girlish laughter and maternal feet. Gentlemen, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the very sincere way in which this toast has been received, and am happy to declare that the Institution is now open, and the meeting adjourned sine die.”
Going home, the Babe had to stand in the bows to look out for snags and shoals. He carried a lantern in his hand by the light of which he scrutinised with agonised intentness the dark surface of the water. Just above Byron’s Pool the boat ran into a sunken tree trunk and the Babe and his lantern plunged heavily into the water. So he dressed himself in the tablecloth, and his appearance was inimitable. He did not stop in Cambridge for the May week.
VII. — THE BABE’S “SAPPING.”
Lo, when an oyster, succulent and tender.
Leagued with lemon, courted by cayenne,
Makes its inevitable sweet surrender,
Delicately dies, it knows not why or when, —
“Could aught atone?” pathetically asked he.
He whom ye wot, to find that unaware
Oysters would be indubitably nasty.
Natives or not, because July is here?
ST. SWITHIN.
THE Babe spent June and the first half of July in London. He painted his bicycle white with Mr. Aspinall’s best enamel, and presented a very elegant appearance on it every morning in Battersea Park. The elections were on, and his father, who represented the Conservative interests of a manufacturing town in the North of England, was absent from London, in the hopes of representing them again. But party questions did not interest his son, and the Babe, reflecting that whether the Liberals or Conservatives governed the country, Battersea Park would still be open to him and his bicycle, pursued his calm course on a moderately evenly-balanced wheel.
So the Babe had a commodious house in Prince’s Gate at his disposal. For he was the only child, and his mother, who was a keener politician even than his father, accompanied the latter on his political errands. It occurred to him that he might turn an honest penny by letting the whole of the first floor for a week or two after the manner of Mr. Somerset, when he found himself in possession of the Superfluous Mansion, but after some consideration, he dismissed this as an unworthy and inconvenient economy, and telegraphed to Reggie to leave Cambridge and the May week to take care of themselves and join him. Reggie had kept his term, so he obeyed, taking with him several classical books, for the Babe, so he said in his telegram, meant to “sap.”
The Babe’s “sapping” was conducted on highly original principles. He got up at eight, “in order,” he said, “to get a long morning,” had a cup of tea, and then took his bicycle with him in his mother’s victoria to Battersea Park, where he rode till ten, and then had breakfast. He got back to Prince’s Gate about eleven in the victoria which waited for him at the Park, had a bath and dressed, and usually went off to Lord’s where he watched cricket till lunch time from the top of the pavilion, and if the match was interesting stopped on till about five. He then went to the Bath Club where he bathed and had tea, returning home in time to dress for dinner, which he usually took at a friend’s house. The evening was spent at a theatre or a music hall, and he finished up if possible at a dance. If he had no dance to go to, he read the evening paper at a club, and went to bed.
“In fact,” as he explained to Reggie, who arrived one evening about seven, “we shall lead a simple and strenuous life even in the midst of this modern Babylon. The bicycle and the Bath Club will minister to the needs of the body, and our minds will minister to each other. We take our dinner to-night at home, and after dinner it would be rash not to see Miss Cecilia Loftus. She can dance like fun. I hope you have brought some books, for otherwise you will have nothing to do when I am working. It’s time to dress. I see my father made four speeches yesterday. His energy is perfectly amazing. We will send for the evening paper, for there are things of overwhelming interest in it, I am told, apart from politics.”
The programme at the “Pavilion” waned in interest after the performance of Miss Cecilia Loftus, and about eleven the Babe proposed an adjournment. It was a warm clear night, and they started back, walking along Piccadilly instead of taking a hansom. The streets were full, and characteristically “London,” in other words they were crowded with all sorts and conditions of men and women, who eyed one another with suspicious reserve. In Paris the birds of night look at each other with friendly interest, in London with mistrust and enmity.
The Babe was in an expansive mood, and like Byron, he bitterly lamented his own loneliness in the crowd.
“Here am I,” he said, “a young man of pleasing manner, and amiable disposition, and I feel like a solitary wayfarer in the desert of Sahara. When the four men in the New Arabia
n Nights left Prince Florizel’s smoking divan, and plunged into the roaring streets, they were engulfed by strange adventures before they had gone a hundred yards. The Lady of the Superfluous Mansion annexed one, the Fair Cuban another, the man with the chin beard a third. What could be more delightful? And yet I might walk the streets till the crack of doom, and the archangels would have to send me home at the last, still adventureless.”
“Poor Babe,” said Reggie, “but perhaps every one else is in the same plight; perhaps they are all longing for you to speak to them.”
“I don’t think so,” said the Babe, “they seem to me supremely indifferent as to whether I speak to them or not. What are we to do, Reggie? The night is yet young, but we are growing old. I think a little supper, four or five dozen native lobsters, as Mrs. Nickleby suggested, would not hurt us. I hear that there is a most commodious restaurant at the Savoy Hotel. It would be well to be certain on that point. We are walking in the wrongs direction but we will do so no longer. Let us take a hansom. Nothing will happen to us. But we will give this wicked world one more chance. We will walk back across Leicester Square. It is supposed to be the fountain-head of all adventures, and the home of all adventurers. We will loiter there a few moments.”
“What sort of adventures do you want, Babe?” asked Reverie.