by E. F. Benson
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER I
DAMON and Pythias, collegiately and colloquially known as Day and Pie, were seated in Damon’s room in the great quadrangle, on two chairs, side by side, with a candle on the table that guttered in the draught, and a copy of “Socrates’s Apology” (in the original Greek) between them. Between them also, propped up against the candle, was a firmly literal translation of what they were reading, to which they both constantly referred. Underneath the candlestick in a far less accessible position, since they desired to consult it much less frequently, was a Greek lexicon. First one of them translated a few lines, with an eye fixed on the English equivalent, and then the other. That was a more sociable way of working than to sit separate and borrow the crib from each other. Besides, there was only one candle, stolen from another fellow’s room, as the electric light had, half an hour ago, got tired and gone to sleep. The books, therefore, had to be centrally situated in this small field of imperfect illumination.
They had got to the point where Socrates, having been warned to prepare for the administration of the cup of hemlock at sundown, had sent for his wife, Xantippe, and his children. But she had made so unphilosophical a howling and feminine outcry that he had sent his family away, and proceeded to spend his last hour in the company of his friends.
Damon paused — he was translating at the moment — and lit a pipe, while Pythias relaxed his attitude of polite attention.
“I vote we stop,” he said. “Socrates was evidently jolly sick of it all and wanted to stop, too. It wouldn’t do to fly in the face of Socrates. Whisky?”
Pythias shut the translation up in the original text.
“I’m not by way of drinking whisky,” he said, “but if you’ve got some ice and soda-water—”
“Which you ordered for me, and put down to my account—” continued Damon.
“So I did. In that case I don’t mind for once: I think I should rather like it. It tastes beastly, but on the other hand, I drink it not for what it is, but for what it does. And I’m talking like Socrates. In other words, I drink it not for drinky but for drunky. It makes gay. Lord, what a candle! By the grace of God, or probably without it, I could light a better candle than that. I could light such a candle, as an Archbishop said just before they lit him. When do you suppose the electric light will cease being funny?”
“‘Bout morning.”
Damon took the guttering candle away, in order to get Pythias the refreshment that apparently he didn’t want from his gyp-cupboard, and left him in the dark. Upon which it seemed good to Pythias to scream for his nurse and his mother in shrill falsetto. Damon couldn’t find the ice at once, for it had been put, wrapped up in a cloth, in his washing-basin, in order not to drip, and Pythias, with the exuberance of youth, continued screaming....
Damon was the elder of the two by the space of an entire year, which, when the one is twenty and the other only nineteen, is the equivalent of a decade or so later on. People of fifty and sixty, in the eyes of youth, are of about the same age, just as people of nineteen and twenty in the eyes of the more mature are contemporaries. But the view of youth is probably the more correct, for when a man has passed some fifty years in this puzzling world, he has solved any problem of interest that he is likely to solve, has seen all that he is really capable of observing, and has assimilated all that his mental and moral digestion is able to tackle. Consequently, it matters very little how much older than fifty he is....
But there are wonderful things dawning every day on those of the sunnier age; fresh horizons expand to their climbings, new stars swim into larger heavens, virgin and undiscovered slopes mount upwards for eager footsteps. Eventually the table-land is reached, and given that no national crisis or peril comes along to make everybody look upwards again to toppling precipices of ice, or menace of volcanic flame, the more elderly trot quietly thereafter, to the eyes of youth, along a mild and level road. They have married and begotten children, or they have remained single with Pekinese dogs and knitting or the club bow-window with the evening papers, to distract them gently as they move slowly on, and to the young it all seems very remote and staid and uninteresting. The exciting, the experimental age, when everything is worth trying, and almost everything worth doing, has been left behind; youth, with its causeless anticipations, and even more causeless disillusionments, its insatiable curiosity, its stainless “seeing what things are like,” has sunk gently below the horizon, and the desire even for experiment has failed.
Our happy heroes, however, one screaming in the dark, the other exploring a cupboard, had no idea what most things were like, except that, without discrimination, they found that most things were jolly. At present their best actual achievement was to have found each other, and on that point, despite the discrepancy of their ages, their discoveries were of pretty equal merit. They had been at Eton together, and the intense friendship formed there had, rather unusually, renewed itself and burned with a brighter flame when they came together again, not yet a year ago, at St. Stephen’s College, Cambridge. They shared the widening horizon, and yet kept their smaller horizon — the fresh excitements and licences of the University had not obliterated the old. To people like tutors and godfathers, Damon was known as Jim Lethbridge, Pythias as Robin Linnet. It was inevitable, therefore, that he should be more widely and intimately known as “Birds,” for how could there be an amalgamation in one set of human limbs of a Robin and Linnet without “Birds” being the natural formula for the owner?
It was a very hot night at the beginning of May, and, returning late from an idle afternoon of paddling and bathing on the upper river, they had neither of them gone into dinner in Hall, which would have implied changing from shirt and flannel trousers and nothing much besides into a more formal attire. So Birds had ordered in a loaf of bread, a cold duck and a pot of jam to his own account, and some ice and soda-water and a bottle of whisky to Jim’s, which seemed about fair. The remains of this meal, about enough for a small cat, lay on the table in the window.
Then the electric light had ceased to be, and a single stolen candle had guttered over a half-hour’s Plato....
So Jim returned with preventives against thirst, and in putting down the guttering candle, spilt some hot wax over Robin’s brown hand. So he stopped screaming, and began obscenely swearing. The obscenity meant nothing whatever, nor did the amazing oaths: he talked like that just because he was a boy, and there was only a boy to listen to him. But peace returned with the long iced drink, and his mind went back to Socrates and Xantippe.
“Of course he sent her and the kids away,” he said. “Being a female, she didn’t understand him and his friends. He wanted to have a little sensible conversation before dying. I’m sure I should. Do come and see me when I’m dying, Jim. I’ll have you and my mother, because she’s frightfully decent.”
“She can’t have much in common with you then,” said Jim. “Better have the girl who sang about the oysters.”
“Oysters on the pier, I remember. That was at Easter, wasn’t it? You and I went together, and waited at the stage-door. And she was with another chap. Wonder who he was. Wonder...”
“What do you wonder?”
“Oh, nothing. It was only a rag. But I suppose girls cease to be a rag some time. People go and marry them and live with them happily ever afterwards. I should be awfully uncomfortable if I thought I was going to live with one girl for ever. Buxom: they get buxom. There’s that Jackson girl: she’s buxom already. Lord!”
“That Jackson girl,” said Jim, “told Badders you had the most beautiful mouth she ever saw. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No. She wants to kiss me, and I don’t want to kiss her: that’s where we arc. She’s like a fat ferret, though most of them are lean. Marrying now! I don’t want to m
arry anybody. I shouldn’t sleep a wink with somebody snorting and breathing all night long. And if you have a separate room they divorce you, don’t they?”
“Usually.”
“Well, the sooner I’m divorced the better,” said Robin.
“You’ve got to marry first.”
Robin took a long draught from his whisky and soda.
“I should like to be divorced first,” he said, “and marry afterwards. And yet some fellows think about nothing but girls the whole blessed day. Badders does. Pure waste of time. Give me a girl for ten minutes, and then let me come back to my own little room. There’s a time for everything under the sun, and, thank God, it’s not time to marry yet!” —
Birds had lit a couple of cigarettes by mistake as he gave utterance to these misogynistic expressions, and put one in each corner of his beautiful mouth, and tried to drink his whisky and soda with the section of mouth that lay in between them. That was not a very great success, because one cigarette fell into his glass and the other got whisky-logged. So he had to have some more ice and whisky and soda-water. Jim, at the moment, was bending over the candle as he lit his pipe, and there was a convenient cavity between his neck and the collar of his shirt. And with the force and suddenness of conviction or conversion, it was borne in upon Birds that a small lump of his ice must be instantly inserted in that opening. This feat was accomplished with masterly precision. Jim gave one gasp of surprise and shock as the ice slid down his spine, and turned the siphon full into Birds’ face. This half blinded him for a moment, then he seized Jim round the waist and closed with him. The siphon got wedged between their chests, and Jim’s iron finger never relaxed till it was empty, though he received his due share of the contents himself. A chair crashed to the ground, the table toppled and overturned, the candle went out, and from the darkness came squeaks and pants from the entangled wrestlers. Birds’ dripping shirt was split from shoulder to waist by the nozzle of the siphon, but eventually he wriggled from under the super incumbent Jim, sat firmly on his chest, and grasped the pit of his stomach.
“Well?” he said, very much out of breath.
“All right: that’ll do. Whatever we are, let’s be calm. And dignified.... Dignified.... And calm.
... Besides, that lump of ice won’t melt, and it’s hurting me.”
“Are you sorry? Damned sorry?” asked Birds.
“Yes! Oh, get up, you foul pig!”
The door opened, and Badders, who was Badsley, looked in. At that precise moment the electric light was restored, and shone on the upheaval.
“I thought I heard a cuckoo singing,” he remarked, “or some other bird.”
Jim advanced stealthily on him.
“That is very interesting,” he said. “You thought you heard a cuckoo, did you? Birds, get between him and the door.”
The ill-starred Badders was a moment too late in his retreat. Birds tripped him up, and Jim laid him flat on the floor. “The only question is what to do with him,” he said. “Shall we bind the sacrifice with cords? Cuckoo, indeed! That’s an insult to you, Birds. You shall choose.”
So Badders was tied up, trussed like a fowl and set in the corner, and the others threw paper darts at his face. He was obliged under threat of torture to open his mouth wide, and the first who threw a paper dart into it won. It lasted some time, and then the usual evening rag was over, the room was restored to some semblance of order, and all three sat down for refreshments. Birds stripped off his torn and dripping shirt, and sat on the floor just as Nature had made him as far as the waist. She had made him very nicely indeed.
“Fifth of May,” announced Badsley, “and I would to God it were the fiftieth.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve got my Tripos coming on. That’s the result of being so devilish clever and being told to take your Tripos in your second year. I almost wish I was a fool like Jim or you. What have you two been doing? Why weren’t you in Hall?”
“Went up to Granchester in a canoodle, which rhymes with caboodle.”
“There was a young lady of Exeter,” remarked Badders thoughtfully.
“No, there wasn’t. At least, we know all about her.”
“She was more amusing than going to Granchester. Why didn’t you play cricket this afternoon instead of slacking?”
“Because I’m playing for the University of Cambridge all to-morrow and the next day,” said Birds, “and three days’ consecutive cricket is more than I can bear.”
“That’s swank.”
“It is. You’d swank if you had been asked to play for the’ Varsity. ‘Oh, Mr. Linnet,’ they said to me, they did, ‘will you come and play bat and ball with us? It would be nice of you, it would. Some boys from Middlesex are coming up to play against us, they are, and we will have such fun!’ So I said I would, I did, and I will. There’ll be three stumps one end and three stumps the other, and a lot of little popping creases. And I shall put my bat in front of my wicket, and hit the ball high, high up in the air, and they’ll all run to catch it together, and then dear little Birds will have made one run.”
“God!” said Jim. There really seemed very little else to say.
“After that—” began Birds again.
“Oh, shut it!”
“After that,” said Birds, not paying the slightest attention, “I shall pat the little popping creases with my little bat, and change hats with the umpire. And when they’re all ready again—”
“He’s drunk,” said Badders.
“I think it extremely unlikely: I am dead sober. Oh, I went to a lecture by Jackson to-day, and noticed for the first time that he had a green moustache. Why is that, I wonder?”
“Did he give you a billy dux from Julia?”
“Yes. And told us a great deal about the Peloponnesian War that I really had no conception of before. No conception whatever, I assure you. The Peloponnese is shaped like a fig leaf, hence its name, and when Adam and Eve were turned out of the Paradise, and sent to the Vomitorio, as Jackson said—”
“He didn’t.”
“Quite right, he didn’t. But I am delirious to-night, and attribute it to spending the afternoon on the Cam. Lord, it was jolly up there! Beechen green and shadows numberless, you know, and lots of peewits. And Jim sang of summer in full-throated ease. My throat was full, too, because we had tea.”
Jim had lain down on the floor, with his back propped up against Birds’ knees, who in turn was propped up by the sofa where Badders sat.
“Hail to thee, blithe peewit, Birds thou never wert,” he remarked fatuously.
“Never,” said Birds, suddenly opening his knees, so that Jim fell flat on the ground. He made no effort whatever to move, and continued lying there, while Birds got up and put a college cap on his head, and invested himself in a scholar’s gown, which, against his bare skin, looked somehow strangely indecent. He put his head on one side, in the manner of Jackson lecturing, and pulled the place where his moustache would have been, had he had one.
“I can’t think what Sphodrias was about,” he began, “and if you’ll turn to the third chapter of the fourth book you’ll see how perfectly inexplicable it was that he should have been kicking his heels at Sphacteria—”
He broke off.
“Lor! A very poor sort of fellow is Jackers,” he said.
“And if it hadn’t been for Jackers there’d have been no Julia,” remarked Jim, as he lay gazing at the ceiling from his prone position on the hearth-rug.
Julia’s victim considered this. He had found a small piece of duck left from the meal that he and Jim had made earlier in the evening, and decided it was worth eating.
“No, you’re wrong there,” he said. “There would have been Julia somehow, with or without Jackers. Julia’s the sort of girl who is bound to happen, like earwigs and Tripos. Julia Jackson! What a name! Did you ever hear such a name?”
Badsley had sat up on the sofa and was regarding Birds as he sat eating duck with bare chest and bare arms, clad in his pr
eposterous college cap and gown and pair of flannel trousers.
“Do put something else on, Birds,” he said, “or take something off. You make me blush. Why is it that a man with no clothes on is quite proper, but a man with no clothes and a top hat is so wildly improper?”
“Dunno, and duncare. I’m quite comfortable, I am. I wish there was some more food.”
“Whereas in silks my Julia goes,” said Jim.
“Take her, then: she’s your Julia. You said so,” said Birds, with his mouth full. “That’s all right.”
“Birds, you talk about girls in a perfectly beastly way,” said Badsley.
“I don’t talk about them at all unless somebody else begins. Then I say what I think, like a little gentleman. I like girls, smart ones, like those in revues, just for a little while. Whereas Badders—”
“Badders the troubadour touched his guitar,” said Jim. “But I hope he won’t.”
“I won’t,” said Badders. “All the same, to pass through a single day without feeling keen about a girl seems to me an awful waste of time.”
“Gay Lothario,” said Jim. “Who is it now? Still the thing in the tobacconist’s shop?”
“No, you ass, of course not. That was only—”
“Practice, to keep the Troubadour’s hand in,” said Birds. “Poor little devil! Think what you make them suffer, Badders. All the little victims in a row, dying for love of the lusty troubadour. Thing in the tobacconist’s shop has expired, I suppose. Who is it now?”
“It’s your grandmother,” said the nettled Badders.
“Well, you have put your foot in it there,” said Birds serenely. “She died last Sunday.”
“Oh, I say, I’m sorry,” said Badders.
Jim, lying on the floor, gave one loud puff of suppressed laughter, and was silent again; Badsley thought it odiously unfeeling of him.
“I say, Birds, I really am sorry,” he repeated.
“Yes, I know. That’s all right,” said Birds quietly. “How could you have told? Dear old Grannie! She always lived with us, you know.”