Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “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 selfdefence.

  “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 ruthles
sly 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 openhanded 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 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. Goodbye.”

  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 arre
st, 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.