Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “It is all wrong,” he said, “you have not got the spirit of it. You do not sound the note of fate. Those last bars should be a long low wail, prophetic of woe, and pianissimo — pianissimo ma con smorgando tremuloso He patted the air in front of Reggie, with an eloquent gesture.

  “They are marked ff.” said the leader of the Argive elders in good plain English.

  “Well, you must erase your double forte,” said Dr. Propert.

  The conductor folded his arms, and waited till Dr. Propert had retired up O. P.

  “We will now begin again four bars back, at the double forte,” he remarked.

  “Yes, pianissimo” said the doctor turning round.

  The Argive elders looked puzzled. Diplomacy, to judge by their speeches, was not their strong point.

  “Are we to do it double forte or pianissimo?” asked Reggie of the conductor.

  “I presume that Doctor Propert has informed Professor Damien of the alterations he has thought fit to make in the music,” he remarked bitterly.

  But as Doctor Propert was already employed in showing Agamemnon, who was about to enter, how to lean against a door in the attitude of a Sophoclean adult, the sarcasm fell innocuous, and the practice proceeded fortissimo without further interruption.

  Agamemnon had forgotten his first line, and at Dr. Propert’s suggestion said “Boble, boble, boble,” until he remembered the second or third lines, and the chorus grouped themselves round the watchmen and smoked, while the altar, relieved of its localising duties, quarrelled with the other unemployed directors, and prompted Agamemnon intermittently.

  But as the scene between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra proceeded and the Babe warmed to his work, other conversation drooped and died. He found it bored him simply to say the part, and throughout the rehearsals, even when he had to read his part, he acted it all. But at this stage in rehearsal he knew it by heart, and in looking at him one quite forgot his deerstalker cap and long, loud ulster. The stage directors were reconciled and murmured approbation, the conductor ceased talking to the watchmen, and the thing began to take shape. Even the subsequent appearance of Mr. Sykes, who sat down in the middle of the stage and smiled at the chorus, caused no interruption. He fell perfectly flat, and no one took the slightest notice of him.

  Once only was there an interruption, and that was made by the Babe himself. Dr. Propert was busy hauling a metope on to the stage, and letting go of it for a moment, it fell resonantly onto its back. The Babe stopped dead, and turned round.

  “If you make such a horrible row again, while I’m on,” he said, “you may take the part of Clytemnestra yourself. I shall begin again,” he added severely, “at the beginning of my speech.”

  The conductor could have embraced the Babe on the spot, and the other stage managers giggled. The Babe waited till they had quite finished, and then began again thirty-four lines back.

  The truth was that all the Babe’s flippancy and foolishness left him when he was acting, and only then, for acting was the one thing he took quite seriously. He ceased to be himself, for he threw himself completely into the character he was impersonating. He was in fact not an amateur, but an actor, and these two have nothing whatever to do with one another. If a man has dramatic power, he may become an actor with training, without it he cannot. And most amateurs have not got it.

  So the play proceeded with vigour till Clytemnestra went off with Ægisthus, and shortly after in a hansom with Mr. Sykes. The cold drizzle of the morning had turned to snow, and the melting snow in the streets looked like thin coffee ice. The Babe was playing in a college match that afternoon, and the prospect filled him with a mild despair.

  XII. — A COLLEGE SUNDAY.

  “This gloomy tone,” he said, “is far too rife;

  I’ll demonstrate the loveliness of life.”

  HOTCH-POTCH VERSES.

  REGGIE and Ealing had moved into a set of rooms in Fellows’ Buildings, which they shared together. The set consisted of three rooms, two inner and smaller ones, and one large room looking out on to the front court of King’s. The two smaller rooms they used as bedrooms, but as they each had folding Eton beds, by half-past nine or so every morning, provided that they got up in reasonable time, they were converted for the day into sitting-rooms. The outer room was furnished more with regard to what furniture they had, than what furniture it required. Thus there were two pianos, tuned about a quarter of a tone apart from each other, two grandfather’s clocks, and a most deficient supply of chairs. “However,” as Reggie said, “one can always sit on the piano.”

  Ealing’s powers of execution on the piano were limited. He could play hymn-

  tunes, or other compositions, where the next chord to the one he was engaged on followed as a corollary from it, and anything in the world which went so slowly as to enable him to glance from the music to his hands between each chord, however complicated it was, provided it did not contain a double sharp, which he always played wrong. He could also, by dint of long practice, play “Father O’Flynn” and the first verse of “Off to Philadelphia in the Morning”; and there seemed to be no reason why, with industry, he should not be able to acquire the power of playing the other verses, in which he considered the chords to be most irregular and unexpected, deserting the air at the most crucial points. Reggie, however, was far more accomplished. He had got past hymn-tunes. The Intermezzo in Cavaleria Rusticana — even the palpitating part — was from force of repetition mere child’s play to him, and he aspired to the slow movements out of Beethoven’s Sonatas.

  The hours in which each might practise, therefore, demanded careful arrangement. College regulations forbade the use of the pianos altogether between nine in the morning, and two in the afternoon, since it was popularly supposed by the authorities who framed this rule — and who shall say them nay — that all undergraduates worked between these hours, and that the sound of a piano would disturb them. Consequently, Ealing was allowed to play between eight A.M. and nine A.M., every morning, a privilege which he used intermittently during breakfast, and by which he drove Reggie, daily, to the verge of insanity, and Reggie between two P.M. and three P.M. Ealing again might play between three and five, and Reggie from five to seven. During these hours the temporary captain of the pianos, even if he did not wish to play himself, might stop the other from playing except with the soft pedal down. It had been found impossible to regulate the hours after dinner, and they often played simultaneously on their several pianos, and produced thereby very curious and interesting effects, which sounded Wagnerian at a sufficient distance. Finally, the use of the piano was totally prohibited by common consent between two A.M. and eight A.M.

  The Babe, like mournful Œnone, “hither came at noon” one Sunday morning.

  Chapel at King’s was at half-past ten, and that English habit of mind which weds indissolubly together Sunday morning and lying in bed, was responsible for the fact that on Sunday Reggie and Ealing always breakfasted after chapel. But the Babe, unlike that young lady, was in the best of spirits, and as Ealing and Reggie were not yet back from chapel, made tea and began breakfast without them. They came in a few minutes later, both rather cross.

  “When there is going to be a sermon,” said Reggie severely, taking off his surplice, “I consider that I have a right to be told. Morning, Babe.”

  “Oh, have you had a sermon?” said the Babe sweetly. “Who preached?”

  “The Dean. He preached for half-an-hour.”

  “More than half-an-hour,” said Ealing.

  “Totally inaudible, of course, but lengthy to make up for that.”

  “Pour me out some tea, Babe, if you’ve had the sense to make it.”

  “Sermons are trying if one hasn’t breakfasted,” said the Babe. “They are sermons in stones when one asks for bread.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea. I hoped that perhaps one of you would know. Why should I know what I mean? It’s other people’s business to find out. And t
hey for the most part neglect it shamefully.”

  “Shut up, Babe,” growled Reggie. “I wish you wouldn’t talk when I’m eating.”

  “Can’t you hear yourself eat?” asked the Babe sympathetically.

  “Wild horses shall not drag me to Chapel this afternoon,” said Ealing. “We’ll go for a walk, Reggie.”

  “I daresay: at present I can’t think of anything but food. Babe, you greedy hog, give me some fish.”

  “And very good fish it is,” said the Babe genially. “By the way, Sykes is far from well this morning.”

  “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He partook too freely of the anchovies of the Chitchat last night. You will find that in French conversation books.”

  “I saw him indulging as I thought unwisely,” said Ealing. “Then it was surely imprudent of him to drink Moselle cup.

  “He wished to drown care, but it only gave him a stomach-ache. Stewart impressed him so with the fact that we were all Atlases with the burden of the world on our shoulders, that he had recourse to the cup.”

  “And the burden of us all was on Stewart.”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember he said that he felt personally responsible for every undergraduate whom he had ever spoken to? His idea is that each don ought to have an unlimited influence, and that the whole future of England in the next generation lay on each of them, particularly himself. No wonder his eyelids were a little weary, as Mr. Pater says. But after you went he took the other side, and said that the undergraduates were the raison d’etre of the University, and that the dons existed only by their sufferance.”

  “Did Longridge stop?”

  “Yes. He was a little less coherent than usual. I know he took the case of a man at Oxford who threw stones at the deer in Magdalen, though what conclusion he drew from it, I can’t say.”

  “Probably that the deer were really responsible for the undergraduates.”

  The Babe sighed.

  “I have to read a paper next week. I think it shall be on some aspects of Longridge. That is sure to give rise to a discussion if he is there. Give me a cigarette, Reggie.”

  The Babe established himself in a big chair by the fireplace, while the others finished breakfast.

  “I am going to found a club,” he said, “called the S. C. D. or Society for the Cultivation of Dons. Stewart says he will be vice-president, as he doesn’t consider himself a don. We are going to call on obscure dons every afternoon and speak to them of the loveliness of life, for, as Stewart says, the majority of them have no conception of it. Their lives are bounded by narrow horizons, and the only glimpse they catch of the great world, is their bedmaker as she carries out their slop-pail from their bedrooms. They live like the Niebelungs in dark holes and eat roots, and though they are merely animals, they have no animal spirits. He says he knew a don once who by a sort of process of spontaneous combustion, became a dictionary, but all the interesting words, the sort of words one looks out in a Bible dictionary, you know, were missing. So they used him to light fires with, for which he was admirably adapted, being very dry, and in the manner of King Alexander, who, as Stewart asserted became the bung in a wine cork, other dons now warm themselves at him. Stewart was very entertaining last night, and rather improper.

  He said that a Don Juan or two was wanted among the dons, by way of compensation, and he enlarged on the subject.

  “Give us his enlargements.”

  “I can’t. He enlarged in a way that belongs to the hour after midnight on Saturday, when you know that when you wake up it will be Sunday. He was very Saturday-night. He called it working off the arrears of the week, and complained that he hadn’t heard a mouth-filling oath for more than a month. He never swears himself, but he likes to hear other people do it; for he says he is in a morbid terror of the millennium beginning without his knowing it. He skipped about in short skirted epigrams, and pink-tight phrases. At least that was his account of his own conversation when we parted. Oh yes, and he said he didn’t mind saying these things to me because I was a man of the world.”

  “He knows your weak points, Babe,” said Reggie.

  “Not at all. He referred to that as my strong point.”

  “Good old Clytemnestra! I’m better now, thank you, after my breakfast, and it’s ‘ The Sorrows of Death’ this afternoon. I shall go to chapel again.”

  Reggie lit a pipe, and picked out the first few bars on the piano.

  “The watchman was a tiresome sort of man to have about,” he said. “When they asked him if it was nearly morning, he only said, ‘ Though the morning will come, the night will come also.’ Of course they knew that already, and besides it wasn’t the question. I should have dismissed him on the spot. So the soprano has to tell them, which he does on the top A mainly.”

  “When I was a child I could sing the upper upper Z,” said the Babe fatuously. “ Then my voice broke, and the moral is ‘ Deeper and deeper yet.’ Don’t rag: I apologise.”

  Ealing finished breakfast last, and strolled across to the window.

  “It’s a heavenly morning,” he said. “ Let’s go out. We needn’t go far.”

  “I will walk no further than the King’s field,” said the Babe.

  “Very well, and we can sit outside the pavilion. I’m lunching out at half-past one.”

  “Meals do run together so on Sunday. Sunday is really one long attack of confluent mastication,” said the Babe. “It’s a pity one can’t take them simultaneously.”

  Though November had already begun, the air was deliciously warm and mild, and had it not been for the fast yellowing trees, one would have guessed it to be May. But there was a shouting wind overhead, which stripped off the leaves by hundreds and blew the rooks about the sky. Already the tops of the trees were bare, and the nests of last spring swung empty and half ruined high up among the forks of the branches. During the last week a good deal of rain had fallen, and the Cam was swirling down, yellow and turbid. The willow by the river was already quite bare, and its thin feathery branches lashed themselves against the stone coping of the bridge.

  They went through the Fellows’ gardens, for Reggie by some means had got hold of a key; there a few bushes of draggled Michaelmas daisies were making pretence that the summer was not quite dead yet, but they only succeeded in calling attention to the long, desolate beds. The grass was growing rank and matted under the autumn rains, and little eddies of leaves had drifted up against the wires of the disused croquet-hoops. But the day itself seemed stolen from off the lap of spring, and two thrushes were singing in the bushes after an excellent breakfast of succulent worms.

  “We play you to-morrow at Rugger,” remarked the Babe as they walked across the field, “and we play on this ground. It’s sticky enough, and I shall vex the soul of the half opposite me, because I like a sticky ground, and he is certain not to. In fact,” said he confidently, “I purpose to get two tries off my own bat, and generally to sit on this royal and ancient foundation.”

  “The Babe has never yet been called modest,” said Ealing.

  “If I have, I am not aware of it,” said the Babe.

  “We’ve got three blues,” remarked Reggie.

  “I am delighted to hear it,” said the Babe. “You will need them all. And you may tell our mutual friend Hargreave that if he attempts to collar me round the ancles again, I shall make no efforts whatever to avoid kicking him in the face. He did it last time we played you, and I spoke to him about it more in sorrow than in anger.”

  “Upon which the referee warned you for using sorrowful language.”

  “He did take that liberty,” conceded the Babe. “Let’s sit down outside the pavilion. I wish we could kick about. The Sabbath is made for man, and so is Sunday, and so are footballs.”

  “But on Sunday the pavilion is locked up by man, and the footballs put inside.”

  “It appears so. English people take Sunday too seriously, just as they take everything else, except me.”

  “Anyho
w, Stewart says you are a man of the world,” said Ealing.

  “He does, and who are we to contradict him? Good Lord, there’s one o’clock striking. I must go home. There’s somebody coming to lunch at half-past. Reggie, get me a ticket for King’s this afternoon, will you?”

  XIII. — KING’S CHAPEL.

  Music, when soft voices die,

  Vibrates in the memory.

  SHELLEY.

  REGGIE and the Babe got into chapel just after the voluntary had begun, and slow soft notes came floating drowsily down from the echoes in the roof. The chapel and ante-chapel were both full, and from the door in the dim, mellow halfdarkness, a sea of heads stretched up to the black wooden screen, through which streamed the light from the chapel itself. In the roof one could just see the delicate fan-shaped lines of vaulting springing across like lotus leaves from wall to wall, and the windows on the south side gleamed with dark, rich colour from the sky already turning red with the southwestern setting sun. As they went up the ante-chapel the Babe saw a seat still unoccupied, and preferred stopping there to going into the chapel.

  Reggie’s seat was just east of the choir opposite to the window representing Christ standing in the garden after the resurrection. To the right kneels Mary Magdalene gaudily dressed, just having turned and seeing that he was not, as she supposed, only the gardener. To the left rises a green hill, on the top of which, below a row of brown, ragged rocks, stands the empty tomb, with the women round it. By a quaint but curiously felicitous idea of the artist, the figure of Christ is holding a spade in his hand, as if to give colour to Mary’s mistake. His face is Divine, but graciously human, and he waits for the recognition.

  The whole place had an air of tranquil repose, of remoteness from worldliness, hurry, and unprofitable strivings that perhaps has a certain value, which is not necessarily diminished because it is impossible to account for it statistically or categorically. There is something in spacious grey buildings and perfect Gothic architecture, shared too by broad grass lawns and studious, quiet places and uneventful lives, that cannot be altogether left out of the reckoning when one adds up the total value of a University as compared with a modern endowed plan of education, or the admirable schemes of University extension.