Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  “I don’t altogether agree with you,” he said, “about their being mechanical toys. There may be something in them after all. But I do agree with you that the study and construction of them should be conducted at their proper place and not at a University. One of Mackenzie’s gliders, or so I think he calls them, came sailing in yesterday through the open window of my lecture-room, followed a moment afterwards by Mackenzie himself without a word of apology. I think, however, he caught my next sentence, ‘After this most unseemly interruption’... He was meant to in any case. I had a good mind to chuck a Thucydides through the window of his lecture-room and see what he made of that.”

  “He wouldn’t make much of Thucydides,” said Butler witheringly. “He said to me the other day that he thanked God he hadn’t wasted a minute of his life in learning Greek. Latin he appeared to have learned for his own amusement: he liked reading Horace, he told me.”

  “Turning the classics into a mere hobby,” said Waters, “and reading, I make no doubt, without notes or a dictionary, much as you read a French novel.”

  “Amazing?!” said Jackson, with his head on one side. “And the worst of it all is that he seems to have got some sort of hold over the undergraduates which is altogether irregular and unseemly. They talk to him as if he was a slightly senior undergraduate himself. No sort of good can come out of such relationships. A don is a teacher, and an undergraduate is a learner. They must both keep their proper places or the whole University system is undermined.”

  “That’s the danger in having young men as fellows,” said Alison, “who have no sense of their positions and dignity. There’s too much of that sort of thing. And it’s the same at other colleges.”

  Jackson took up his cap and gown.

  “Well, I think we know how to put a pretty firm foot down on it here,” he said. “Master Mackenzie will find that his gliders and his dinner at eight aren’t looked very warmly on. By the way, young Linnet played a fine innings the other day against Middlesex, and he showed me up an uncommonly good piece of Greek prose this week. Cricket and Greek. I wish the undergraduates would stick to them. Then we shouldn’t have much bother with fellows like Mackenzie.”

  Waters took his watch from his pocket and absently wound it up, instead of looking at the time.

  “I was dipping into a play by that obscene Scandinavian dramatist the other day,” he said, “and found a line about the younger generation knocking at the door. Hedda Gabler was it? — anyhow there was a vast lot of gabble.”

  “Obscene?” said Alison. “Isn’t that rather a strong word?”

  “It was rather strong stuff: that is why I chose the word.”

  “I should have said that piffle was nearer the mark,” said Jackson with an air of complete finality.

  “I beg to second that motion, if we’re talking about Ibsen,” said Butler. “But I propose as an amendment that we don’t talk about Ibsen. Why talk about Ibsen?”

  “Well, we won’t,” said Waters. “I delete the obscene Scandinavian, and remark on my own account that the younger generation does seem to me to be knocking at the door.”

  Jackson put on his gown.

  “Sport your oak, then, my dear fellow,” he said, “and go on with your Plato. And shut your windows against Mackenzie’s gliders. Cambridge is all right, there’s life in the old dog yet, and a good set of teeth too, if there’s going to be any question of its dinner. Well, I must go. Very pleasant evening, Butler. Good-night, all of you.”

  His firm step descended the uncarpeted flight of stairs outside in gradual diminuendo, and Alison, as it was Saturday night, took another glass of “his own,” before going to bed.

  “Linnet’s a very attractive fellow,” he said. “I like both him and Lethbridge. But some of those first and second year men are rather a poisonous lot. You know the crew I mean, they run that new paper called Camouflage.”

  “Camouflage?” asked Butler.

  “Yes, French word, with an allusion to the Cam, I conjecture. I looked it up in a dictionary. It’s the art of concealment with intent to deceive, to put it generally. ‘Evasion,’ you might possibly render it by ‘Evasion.’ Haven’t you come across the paper?”

  “I am afraid that my reading does not embrace those usually very callow periodicals,” said Butler. “Pray widen my restricted horizon.”

  “Well, I have glanced at a number or two of it. I should suppress it if I was the Vice-Chancellor, but I don’t deny it’s got a good deal of cleverness. It’s all misdirected cleverness. There was a really very neat piece of Platonic dialogue directed against the teaching of classical languages. There was an interview in the style of the Daily Mail with Villon, that French vagabond rhymster, you know. There was also a poem called ‘Ode to a Pair of Trousers’ couched in Swinburnian language of almost licentious passion. The key to it lay in the last stanza, in which you found out that it was supposed to be written by the poet on a frosty morning after a cold bath. That explained the ‘softness of thy warm embrace, the clinging of thy leg,’ and the rest of it. The poet merely wanted to get his clothes on again. Rather neat, rather in the C.S.C. style.”

  “I cannot at the moment recall anything of Calverley’s that seems to resemble your very vivid précis,” said Butler icily. “And with your permission, I think I will not invest money or time in the purchase and perusal of Camouflage. But without hearing more I am completely in accord with your inclination to suppress it.”

  Alison’s second indulgence in port and water had roused him to a certain Liberalism that usually hibernated.

  “I wish sometimes we could get more into touch with the undergraduates,” he said. “We know about their games to some extent, and we know what their classical reading consists of, and we look over their compositions. But there our knowledge of them and their education abruptly ceases, unless they get into trouble through not keeping chapels, or making a row, or smoking in the quadrangle. You, for instance, just now, Butler, wanted to know no more about Camouflage or its authors.”

  Butler poured himself out a glass of whisky and soda. This, too, was in celebration of Saturday night.

  “My dear fellow,” he said, “your admirable description of the Ode was quite enough for me as regards Camouflage. I should like it immediately suppressed. As for the authors, you yourself said they were a poisonous lot.”

  “I know I did. But I wonder if one could not learn more about the poison, and perhaps supply an antidote. Indeed, what if it isn’t poison?”

  “I am content to take your word that it is,” said Butler, yawning. Conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they, to his mind, whom Cambridge connoted. Cambridge meant to him the life lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. Naturally his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary rebuked.

  But more advanced ideas still floated vaguely in Alison’s mind, as he rose to go.

  “Sometimes I have certain doubts about our educational system,” he observed.

  “Get rid of them,” said Butler, booming from his impregnable fortress.

  While this decorous pleasure-party of the Olympians was in progress, another by no means less pleasurable, though far less Olympian, had been going on partly in Birds’s room, partly in Jim’s, just across the passage. Two or three people had strolled in to see Birds after Hall, two or three more to see Jim, with the effect that there had been an amalgamation and a game of poker.

  Those who did not care to play poker, refreshed themselves with cigarettes and conversation and whisky and soda, and a rather neat booby-trap had been set over the door into Birds’s bedroom. Jelf of the poisonous set, and editor of Camouflage, had devised this, and subsequently forgetting about it, and going into Birds’s bedroom to fetch another glass, had got caught by it himself
, and was now brushing carbolic tooth powder out of his hair. Then Birds, who at the moment was playing poker in Jim’s room, had come in, and by way of reprisal had thrown the rest of the tooth-powder in Jelf’s face, who had sneezed without intermission for ten minutes.

  But the ragging had not gone further than that, and now the party had broken up, leaving only Jelf and Badsley with the owners of the rooms. Jelf was a tall, merry-faced, ugly boy, whose hair when not pink with tooth-powder was black. He wore it long and lanky, with the design, which perfectly succeeded, of annoying those who conformed to the custom of short hair. He wore extraordinarily shabby clothes and professed views of the wildest immorality for analogous reasons.

  “And if I find long black hairs in my brush to-morrow,” said Birds, alluding to these incidents, “I shall make you eat them. Why don’t you get your hair cut like ordinary people?”

  “Because then I should no longer annoy ordinary people. I say, Camouflage is going to be lovely next week. I’ve written a defence of Polygamy. There’s a polygamous tribe in West Africa whose average length of life is seventy-eight. I attribute that to polygamy.”

  “Don’t believe it,” said Birds.

  “You haven’t read my article yet, so you don’t know. It’s style that makes you believe things, and I’ve put it very convincingly with quotations from Taylor’s ‘Anthropology’ and the ‘Golden Bough,’ and Legros’ Travels. No one will turn the passages up, and if they did they wouldn’t find them, because they don’t exist. But it’s all damned scientifically put.”

  “Do you mean you made the whole thing up?” asked Jim.

  “Yes, my child. As I say, it’s all a question of style. You’ll believe it all right. And then there’s another rather neat rag, if you’ll promise not to tell anybody.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve printed a French poem by Victor Hugo, and signed it with my initials.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Why, I shall take a copy very diffidently to Butler, and ask him what he thinks of my French. And I bet you five to one that he says that I had better learn prosody before I attempt to write French verse, or words to that effect. Anyone take it?”

  It seemed so perfectly certain that Butler would say words to that effect that not the wildest gambler would entertain such a hazard.

  “And then you’ll tell him?” asked Jim.

  “Of course not, but it’ll leak out somehow. I shall tell Mackenzie and he’ll do the rest. I wonder why the dons object to me so much? At least, I know why. They think I’m pulling their sacred legs. The Ode to the Trousers annoyed them awfully. They thought it was going to be obscene, and suffered a bitter disappointment.”

  Robin sat down on the floor.

  “Don’t see what you’re playing at,” he said. “It’s perfectly easy to be unpopular, and you take such a lot of trouble about it.”

  “There you’re wrong,” said Jelf. “You couldn’t be unpopular if you tried, Birds. Your hair is nice and short and you’ve a clean face and shave every morning, and play cricket and are exactly like everybody else.”

  “Sooner be like that than like you,” said Robin politely.

  “You couldn’t be like me, if you tried, simply because you can’t think for yourself. You accept all that you’ve been brought up in, like a dear little good boy, eating the dinner that’s given him, and saying his grace afterwards. Being born an Englishman together with Eton and Cambridge has made you precisely what you are, which is exactly the same as Badders and Jim. You do what you’re told without ever asking why. Britannia rules the waves, and church is at eleven on Sunday morning, but you may play lawn-tennis in the afternoon.”

  Jelf got up and waved his arms wildly.

  “You’re all cast in one mould,” he said, “and Lord, how I should like to break it. Here you sit, you and Badders and Jim, and Badders is going to be a schoolmaster, because his father was, and Jim is going to be a clergyman for the same reason, and you’re going to be a bloody lord. Gosh! That’s why you get on so well, simply because you never think. And you never think because you can’t. Happy England! Our national stupidity is the basis of our national prosperity.”

  “That comes out of ‘Intentions,’” remarked Badsley.

  “I daresay it does, but anyhow, they’re not good intentions, which are invariably fatal. But none of you have got any intentions at all, except to be smug and comfortable and stereotyped. There’s Badders with his girls, and Birds with his cricket, and Jim — well, I don’t know what Jim’s with. He’s usually with Birds.”

  “After all, we seem to annoy you without taking any trouble about it,” remarked Badsley, “and you have to take a great deal of trouble to annoy anybody. You’ve got to grow your hair long, and copy out Victor Hugo, and run a paper that nobody reads.”

  But I can’t help it: I must make a protest against respectability. Respectability carried to such a pitch as St. Stephen’s carries it to is simply indecent. Nobody ever gets drunk except me, and I not frequently because I hate feeling unwell afterwards. It’s so degrading to be sick even in a good cause. Why don’t we keep mistresses? Why docs nobody do anything that he shouldn’t according to collegiate standards? Atheism too: Why no atheists? And all the time I’ve got a horrible feeling that I’m really just the same as any of you.”

  “You need not, I assure you,” said Birds in the Butler voice, “be under any mistaken misapprehensions about that.”

  “But I am. I argue and protest, but at bottom—”

  “Oh, kick it, somebody,” said Badsley.

  Jim went and stood in front of the fireplace with his head on one side.

  “The question is how we shall make Jelf more like us,” he said. “Shall we begin by cutting his hair or shaving him, or—”

  There was a wild rush across the room and Jelf jumped out of the window on to the grass outside.

  “Cowards!” he said, and ran to his room and locked himself in.

  Birds, who had just failed to catch Jelf before he jumped out of the window, came back into the room.

  “And the rum thing is that though he talks such awful piffle, he’s about right,” he said. “We don’t think. I say, his Victor Hugo rag is rather a good one.”

  “Top-hole. But what is there to think about except the things that everybody thinks about?”

  “Dunno. But somehow he finds them. Do you remember when there was flue here before Easter, and he went round with a handcart and a bell, calling out, ‘Bring out your dead’? That did me a lot of good.”

  Badsley yawned.

  “I’m going to be a schoolmaster because the governor is,” he remarked,’

  ‘and Jim’s going to be a clergyman, and Birds is going to be a lord. Jelf’s about right. And to-morrow will be Sunday, so I’m going to bed to-day!”

  Birds and Jim were left alone, and Birds began undressing.

  “I think I shall begin by being an atheist,” he said. “How am I to start? But it is true that we all do what everybody else does. Are you going to breakfast with me to-morrow, or I with you? I forget whose turn it is.”

  “Yours. And we can’t think, at least I can’t. If I sat down to think I shouldn’t know what to think about. All the same—”

  Jim took a turn up and down the room, trying to frame words to the idea in his mind.

  “He’s rather Puck-like, is Jelf,” he said. “I don’t think he’s really human. He thinks that people who aren’t epigrammatic, don’t feel. I doubt if he likes anybody — really likes, I mean. You aren’t good for much if you don’t.”

  “That’s what makes him want to pull things down,” said Birds, following vaguely the train of thought. “He can destroy all right; he makes you think nothing’s up to much. But he doesn’t give you anything instead. Lord! I wish I’d been a bit quicker and caught him before he went through the window.”

  He strolled whistling away into his own room.

  CHAPTER III

  THE big loggia at Grote was s
et into the house; the dining-room lay along one side of it, the Italian drawing-room along the other, and a door in the inner wall of it communicated with the entrance hall. The open front was supported by six Corinthian columns, two set against the side walls, while the other four divided into equal spaces its frieze of metopes and triglyphs. It was raised a couple of steps above the broad gravel walk which ran along the southern façade of the house, and bordered the lawn. On the other side of that was the stone-balustraded terrace which fringed the edge of the beech-clad hill that plunged steeply down into the Thames valley. A broad opening had been cut through these woods opposite the centre of the terrace, and from the iron gates there you could look down on the mirror of the stream below which reflected the roofs and orchards of the village opposite. They were still milky-green with the verdure of the spring, and ran on past the house and formed the broad, mile-long avenue that led to the high-road beyond the park-gates.

  The loggia gave the impression of great space and coolness on this broiling June afternoon. It was floored with squares of black and white marble, over which were laid some half dozen big Persian rugs, but the walls were bare save for panels framed in stone wreaths of fruit and flowers. In the centre of it stood a long dining-table, from a corner of which lunch had only recently been cleared away, and Lady Grote and a couple of friends who had arrived with her that morning, were lounging in a group of easy chairs that stood just inside the strip of sunlight lying along the edge of the steps.

  Lady Grote had just rejoined the other two after seeing off Mr. Stoughton, the inexorable Socialist who had also lunched with her, and had now returned to London.

  “He practically told me that Grote and I were thieves,” she remarked rather plaintively. “He said that all this” — and she indicated the surroundings—” really belonged to the human race in general and not to us. We had stolen it.”

  “If you are thieves,” said Lord Thorley in his calm, philosophical voice, “then he is the receiver of stolen goods. He ate and drank in your pilferings with immense appetite.”