by E. F. Benson
Badsley knew nothing of the sort, but his face grew long with penitence.
“Well, I can’t say any more,” he remarked. “I think I’ll go to bed.”
Birds was leaning his elbows on the table, with his head in his hands. He spoke in a choked voice.
“Don’t think anything more about it, old chap,” he said. “’Twasn’t your fault.”
Badsley got up.
“Well, good-night, people,” he said.
“Stop a minute. As you have talked about Grannie, you might like to hear more about her. It wasn’t really such a blow, because she was eighty-five, and had cancer in the pit of her stomach. Also staggers.”
A faint conjecture dawned in Badsley’s mind.
“I say, are you ragging?” he asked.
“Of course I am. I haven’t had a grandmother for years, and I suppose I shall never get one now. I began too late. I can’t think what Sphodrias was about.”
Badsley stumbled over Jim, who was loudly cackling.
“I feel exactly as if I was in a lunatic asylum,” he said.
“You are: in the room where the violent cases are put. This is the padded room.”
Birds squinted horribly, and with his beautiful mouth open and his tongue hanging out, began to count the fingers of one hand with those of the other. With his yellow hair falling over his forehead and his college cap perched on the back of his head, and his insane attire, he looked madder than anything in Bedlam.
“Oh, stop it,” said Badders. “You’ll give me nightmare.”
“I’m one myself. But as we’ve disposed of my grandmother, who is she? Is she a shop-girl or a flower-girl or a barmaid?”
“None. She’s a lady.”
“I see. Tobacconist’s girl was a perfect lady: you often told me so,” said Jim. “Of the two, I think the imperfect kind is the best. They aren’t so damned refined.”
“You two fellows are absolutely idiotic,” said Badders. “There’s no point in anything unless a girl comes into it somehow. I shall go to bed.”
“Do,” said Birds cordially. “And mind you either slam the door or leave it open. Open or slammed: don’t shut it properly whatever happens.”
After this Badsley could hardly do less than slam the door first, and then throw it wide open. So Jim threw a cushion at it which shut it again.
“Badders is tedious,” he said, getting up from the floor. “He can only think of one subject in the whole world. Narrow, I call it. What’s the next thing to do?”
The two went to the window of these rooms on the ground floor and leaned out, sniffing the warm night air. The sky was moonless but very clear, and a host of stars made that amazing twilight which is like no other in the world for infinite suggestive softness. Instead of the blacks and whites of moonlight, the world was painted in myriad shades of browns from the darkest hues of sepia where shadow lay over black, to a colour nearly yellow, where the rim of white stone round the fountain in the middle of the court stood open to the full galaxy of starlight. To the right the openwork of the stone screen that separated the court from the street outside let in the white garishness of the incandescent lamps, but it did not penetrate far, and the great windows and pinnacles of the chapel opposite, and the long block of the Fellows’ Buildings to the left were all submerged in this dim brown sea of starlight. There was a flower-box along the window from which they leaned, and a faint smell of musk and mignonette wandered into the room thick with tobacco smoke.
“Breath of air before bed, don’t you think?” said Jim. “Come on!”
“Yes, just as far as the bridge. Lend me a coat, will you? I should be proctorized for only having a cap and gown, shouldn’t I?”
“Probably. There’s a blazer.”
The two boys strolled into the night arm-in-arm and walked silently out on to the huge square of grass behind Fellows’ Buildings. A heavy dew had fallen after this hot day, and the surface of the grass was covered with a shimmering grey mantle of moisture, in which their steps made dark rents. Birds, as became him, whistled gently under his breath, but for a time neither of them broke the secret sense of intimate companionship by speech. No breeze stirred in the towers of the elms to the left; even the willow by the side of the bridge had no movement in its slim pendulous fingers of leaf, and the reflecting surface of the slow stream was unbroken by any wandering ripple. Once or twice a feeding fish made a dim pattern of concentric circles on the water, and still in silence, Birds struck a match to light a final cigarette. Though the night was so windless, he shielded it in his hands, and the light showed through the flesh of his fingers as through the walls of some rosy cave. For the moment his face was vividly illuminated, then, as he dropped the match over the parapet, it was swallowed back into the darkness again. From below, after an interval, came the faint hiss of the extinguished match.
The light close to his face had dazzled Jim a little, and after it had gone out he still had before his eyes, faintly swimming in the darkness, the semblance of Birds’ head.
“I can see you still,” he said, “though it’s dark. Why’s that? Oh, now you’ve gone.”
Birds drew on his cigarette.
“No, I haven’t,” he said. “I’m here all right. Ah, listen!”
Early though it was in the summer, this hot spell of weather had set the birds mating, and suddenly from the elms across the field beyond the bridge, there sounded the bubbling song of some love-entranced nightingale. Liquid and clear it rose and fell, with all spring behind it and all the promise of summer to follow. Four long notes it gave, and broke into a torrent of jubilant melody. It rose to the height of its ecstasy and suddenly stopped.
“Good bird,” said Jim appreciatively. “I call that sense.”
“Yes. Glad we came down here. But I’m glad Badders didn’t come too. It would have reminded him of that wench in the tobacconist’s shop, and he’d have told us about her bosom or her ankles, or something. Poor Badders; I do hate sentimental stuff. Lord! Wasn’t it funny about my grandmother?”
“Yes; you see, Badders prides himself on always being in love. He isn’t an atom; he doesn’t know what it means. He doesn’t care for the girl; he only cares for her nose or her arms. If he was in love he couldn’t jaw about it.”
Birds spat neatly over the parapet.
“I wonder. Perhaps there are different ways of being in love. But what a gay dog! Do you remember him at the fair in Midsummer Common, two girls, one on each knee and another round his neck. Something female he wants, and he doesn’t care what it is.”
“I know; that’s what’s so puzzling. I could understand if it was one girl he wanted, but it isn’t. Any old thing will do, as long as it’s young.”
“‘Well, I suppose it’s natur’. She’s a rum ‘un, is Natur’,’ said Mr. Squeers. Badders is asleep by this time, dreaming of them all. I’d sooner be awake, leaning over this bridge.”
“Same here,” said Jim. “But Badders is a sensual sentimentalist. That’s what he is.”
Jim’s arm was conveniently laid out along the parapet, so Birds rested his chin on it.
“What do we do to-morrow?” he asked.
“You play for the’ Varsity.”
“Blow it, so I do. I don’t blow it at all, really. I’m frightfully pleased that they’re playing me. But one can’t say that out loud, so one has to say one doesn’t care. The pity of it is that I shall get out first ball, and spend the rest of the day in missing catches. I wonder why I’m such a dam’ bad field?”
“Ask another. But do make a lot of runs. I so much prefer that you should.”
“And to think that it was you who put me into the eleven at school.”
“It was kind of me,” said Jim. “If I’d known you’d have gone ahead of me like this, I shouldn’t have done it.”
“I suppose not. You’re a jealous devil,” said Birds, speaking muffled against Jim’s arm.
“I am. Are we going to bed to-night?”
Birds yawned.
“I s
uppose we might. It’s about two in the morning, isn’t it?”
“There or thereabouts. Come on, you lazy hog.”
Birds threw an arm round Jim’s neck.
“Lazy I am; hog I am not,” he observed. “Jim, what’s to happen to us? What’s it all going to be about? Shall we always go on like this?”
“I hope so. Don’t you? I don’t see what else I want.”
“No, but Cambridge will come to an end, and we shall go our ways, I suppose. Some day we shall meet each other, and find that we’ve drifted away. You’ll be father of one family, and I shall be father of another, and we shall look at each other and wonder if it really could have been we who sat on the bridge at midnight or a good deal after, and didn’t want anything else.”
“Rot,” said Jim.
“I wish I thought it was.”
“But it is. Can’t explain it properly, but I know it is. Perhaps—”
Jim thought a moment, as they drifted on to the grass again.
“It’s like this,” he said. “Whatever happens to us afterwards, this, the fact of you and me being friends, will be part of us. It’s built into us; we couldn’t get rid of it if we wanted to. We should have been other sorts of fellows if we hadn’t tumbled into each other, but now we’re just the sort we are.”
They had come back on to the tracks they had made in the dew on their way down to the bridge, and Jim pointed at them.
“It’s like that,” he said. “We’ve walked right away off the grass and yet we come back to where we were when we went out. It’ll always be like that; there’ll always be the old tracks waiting for us. When you’re seventy-nine and I’m eighty and we’re both deaf and blind and rheumatic, there’ll be the tracks there just the same. ‘Fraid I’ve been jawing.”
“Well, what’s the harm?” said Birds.
“Bad habit to get into.”
They rambled back without further speech into Jim’s room, where Birds discarded his friend’s blazer and collected his own torn shirt.
“I shall have a good eye to-morrow,” he said, “because I’ve sat up so late, and smoked so much. The way to be thoroughly off colour is to go to bed early and have a long night. That makes you drowsy all next day.”
He nodded at Jim by way of good-night and went across the passage to his room just opposite.
With Birds playing for Cambridge, it was obvious that Jim would have to spend the whole of the next two days in the pavilion at the University ground, and deny himself the pleasure of attending any lectures which might have been provided for him by the College authorities. It was therefore a little unfortunate that he met his tutor proceeding in cap and gown to the lecture-room next morning, exactly at the moment when he himself came out into the court with a straw-hat and a pleasant holiday aspect.
Mr. Butler had the appearance of a butler, which was a very happy coincidence, an air of impenetrable respectability and mutton-chop whiskers. He prided himself on the possession of a sarcastic tongue, the effect of which on his victims he believed to be as withering as a sirocco wind. For the present, however, he contented himself with an awful glance at Jim, for his sarcasm had to be carefully prepared. But since Birds had just telephoned down from the cricket ground that the University had won the toss and that he himself was going in third wicket, it was no use to dream of attending Mr. Butler’s discourse on Cicero’s essay on friendship, for the real thing called him.
The University had made a disastrous start when he arrived at the ground, and had lost two wickets for eleven runs. Jim made his way to the pavilion and there found Birds in a very clammy condition of nerves.
“Oh, hell, I wish you hadn’t come up,” he said. “I hate your being there when I make a fool of myself.”
“Remedy lies with you,” said Jim. “Don’t do it.”
“Can’t help it; my eye’s all wobbly. Why the deuce didn’t you let me go to bed in decent time last night?”
“Go on, say anything you like if it makes you feel better,” said Jim.
“It doesn’t, it makes me feel worse. Hell, there’s Tobin out.”
“Buck up, Birds,” said his friend.
Birds waited till the dejected batsman had entered the pavilion, put his cap on the seat, and took up his bat.
“Soon be back,” he observed morosely.
“No you won’t. I shan’t see you again till lunch.”
“Oh,” said Birds, with a wealth of incredulity in his voice.
He had a word with the outcoming batsman, who was captain of the Cambridge team, and was told to keep steady at all costs. But when your knees are trembling and the inside of your hands is damp with the dews of anxiety, such advice does not seem to be within the spheres of practical usefulness. And with a sinking heart that for the moment was far out of the range of any encouraging influence, he went forth on that awful pilgrimage to the scene of execution.
There ensued two or three extremely trying minutes. The wicket-keep appealed for a catch at the wickets off the first ball he received, in accents of supreme confidence. But the umpire happened to disagree with him. The next was a long-hop which Birds slashed at and completely missed, the third beat him as completely, and must have grazed his leg-stump. And if there was a thoroughly unhappy Pythias out there, there was an even more miserable Damon in the pavilion. Jim wished he was anywhere but here, watching this deplorable performance; had it been possible, he would have been back in the lecture-room, listening to Butler’s droning interpretation of Cicero’s remarks on friendship; anything was better than seeing his friend behave as if he had never had a bat in his hands before.
Then quite suddenly, while Birds was waiting for the return of the ball, that had so nearly dismissed him, Jim’s aspect of the situation struck him. Up till this moment he had only been conscious of his own nervousness; now as by a flash he realized how Jim must be hating it, and that would never do. And he ceased to wriggle his toes inside his cricket boots, and awaited the last ball of the over. It was a half-volley, just outside the leg-stump. About four seconds afterwards Jim picked it up from the seat on which it had fallen in the pavilion, and threw it out to square-leg. He gave two or three wild yells, and a long sigh of relief. Never was there a more confident shot than that; nobody in a state of twittering nerves could possibly have played it. He made the sound deduction that Birds had suddenly pulled himself together.
As the morning wore on, the pavilion began to fill up; Tobin came and talked for a little, in a state of the highest disgust at himself, and soon Badsley also appeared. All the time the total on the telegraph board mounted with rapidity, for Birds was playing with that swift, effortless precision that made him the prettiest bat in the world to watch, if only he happened to be making runs. He had a trick of making difficult bowling appear perfectly easy, and put it away to all corners of the field. By one flick of his slim wrist he cut the ball late between point and slip, by another almost more imperceptible he sent it racing behind square-leg to the pavilion boundary. And as Jim had prophesied, he did not have word with him again till he came across the field at lunch-time with eighty-two to his credit. But his innings were worth more than that to his side, for going in at a critical moment he had stopped the rot which had begun to set in.
There was the added excitement for Jim after lunch of seeing Birds make the necessary eighteen runs to complete his century, and it is certain that this engrossed him much more than any consideration of what the’ Varsity total might be. Birds began by hitting three fours off the first over he received, and then a three and a two brought his total up to ninety-nine. He then skied a ball so high that it looked as if it really might be going to soar beyond the power of the earth’s attraction, and become a new and sporting planet. But it failed quite to reach the required altitude, and after a pause that seemed to last many minutes he was caught at long on, and retired amid rounds of applause and sympathetic veilings.
“Bloody ass,” said Jim to him, as he came into the pavilion.
“Rath
er. Did you ever see a ball go so high? Hullo, there’s Badders. Why not amorously engaged, Badders? Lord, I have been enjoying myself, and I want an enormous drink, and why should not the young Cantab have one? One or two, several, in fact, as the
Red King said—”
“’Twasn’t, it was the White Knight.”
“I daresay. As long as it got said, what’s the odds? Ninety-nine; that’s what they tell you to say when they think you’ve got consumption. Shall I have tea first and three bottles of ginger-beer afterwards, or the other way round? Good-bye.”
CHAPTER II
MR. JACKSON, a tall, short-sighted clergyman with the green moustache, and classical tutor at St. Stephen’s College, was accustomed to dine en garçon every Saturday night in Hall, instead of en famille at home, and after two or three glasses of port, play a rubber of whist in the room of one of his colleagues. To-night the gathering was planned to take place at Mr. Butler’s rooms in the Fellows’ Buildings, and it was with great pleasure that he had heard his host ask Waters and Alison to complete the four. They were all Classical dons, tutors and lecturers, and it was completely characteristic of them that they continued to play whist rather than bridge, which they considered a debased and easy variety of dummy whist. All four had minds of the same academic calibre, and they constituted in this very Conservative college the stronghold and inner defences of Conservatism. Chief among its tenets was the doctrine that Latin and Greek were the sole and essential instruments of education that should be used on the mind of the young, just as cricket and football and rowing were a young man’s proper physical exercises. In later life you could play golf and lawn-tennis and croquet, even as in later life you could learn French and Italian, in which, no doubt, there were many light and agreeable pieces of literature to be enjoyed. But until you had attained to maturity all these minor diversions had best be eschewed. “A fellow,” as Mr. Jackson was fond of saying, “who can write a decent set of Greek Iambics, or translate a piece of Gibbon into Thucydidean Greek, has a trained mind, which can without difficulty acquire any other subject of human knowledge with which his profession makes it desirable that he should be acquainted.”