Works of E F Benson

by E. F. Benson

  Next morning we started again, and came out on the lake of Thun, the shores of which we traversed in some sort of train like an omnibus, with an open top, and in due proportion to the bitterness of the disappointment at Berne came that day’s rapture. We passed below the Niesen, which wore a snow-cap, and my mother told us that the Niesen was nothing particular. Summits gleamed from the other side of the lake, and they were nothing particular; but oh! for the lake itself, while we awaited other incredible developments. It was bluer than the picture in the nursery, and it was trimmed with a translucent bottle-green that showed the shallow water, and sharp as the edge of a riband laid against it came that deep clear blue. From Interlaken we proceeded in carriages, between meadows tall with gentians, and over them there skimmed Apollo butterflies with orange spots on each under-wing, and Camberwell Beauties no less (foreign variety, with a yellow instead of a white border to their wings). And then we turned a corner (I was on the front seat), and Nellie opposite said, “Oh!” and I thought she had been a hypocrite again and didn’t look round, because I was observing a pale clouded yellow. And then she said, “Oh, look!” and I was kind enough to forgive her her hypocrisies and look, and there, straight in front, was the Jungfrau, and the holy maiden was unveiled white and tall above her skirt of dark pine woods, and my heart went out to the snow mountains, and has never yet come back. Much did I suffer at their lovely hands during the next ten years, for that same Jungfrau treated me to an excruciating climb of many hours through soft snow; and the Matterhorn kept his worshipper interminably standing with one foot planted on exiguous icy steps as each was hewn out by the leading guide and the fragments went clinking down the precipice; and the Rothorn (Zienal) gave me a very awkward moment on the edge of a bergschrund; and the Piz Palu came within an ace of causing Hugh to die of syncope owing to the icy wind with which she enwrapped her arête, and the Matterhorn for the second time threw a large quantity of boulders at me because I inconspicuously crossed her eastern face on my way towards the Théodul Pass; and the Dent Blanche directed so damnable a blizzard at me that I could not make her further acquaintance. But, as David said, “though all these things were done against me,” yet has my heart never returned to me from the keeping of the great mountains, nor yet from the keeping of the sea which I first saw at Skegness, and if I could choose the manner of my death it would be that I should, above some eminent ice-wall, fall asleep in the immaculate purity of starlit frost, or sink in the sea-caves round about the island of Capri, and, as I sank, see from far below the glitter of the southern sun above me in the clear dusk of deep waters.... If God pleases, I will be frozen or drowned when the time comes for me to have done with this body of mine. I do not covet for its last moment a comfortable bed, and pyjamas, and a medicine bottle on the washstand.... Not that it matters; only I should like the other mode of passage.

  We passed the Staubbach somewhere near Lauterbrunnen and came in the hour of sunset to the little inn at Gimmelwald. And then there was no more spirit left in me, for Eiger and Monck and Jungfrau and Ebneflu and Silberhorn were aflame with the salute of the evening. Maggie sat down to sketch, and was prodigal of rose-madder; but whereas she put rose-madder on to a drawing-block, it was the sun that dyed the snows. And we had bilberries and cream at dinner, and cows went home, swinging bronze bells as they cropped a wayside morsel; and there was a noise of falling torrents and a scent of pasturage, and the excitement of being “abroad” and the knowledge that the Jungfrau would be there in the morning.

  I wish I could estimate even in the roughest manner the amount of luggage which accompanied that month in Switzerland. My father had a heavy box of books and manuscript, for he was working, then as always, when he saw leisure ahead of him, on his Life of St. Cyprian, which he began at Wellington and completed only shortly before his death. Cyprian alone took up a large box, and, apart from that in the way of books, there must have been a great library. There were certainly half a dozen copies of Shakespeare, because of an evening after dinner we read Shakespeare aloud, each taking a character; and there was a quantity of Dickens, which my mother read to us before dinner. Then each of us had some kind of a holiday task, except Arthur. Nellie had something about logic, and Maggie had her political economy, and I had a large Latin dictionary and a large Greek dictionary to elucidate Virgil and the “Medea” of Euripides, and Hugh had, at any rate, a Latin grammar and a volume called “Nuces,” which means “nuts,” and hard they were for him to crack. Everybody, individually, had a Bible and prayer-book and hymn-book, and I am sure there must have been some Sunday books as well. Then the materials for “collections” came along also: there were presses for each of us in which to receive and to dry the flowers we picked, and there were killing bottles for butterflies (not chloroform and oxalic acid any more) containing cyanide of potassium, which killed after you had screwed the lid on, and when you took it off next morning, they were all dead bodies, like Sennacherib’s hosts; and setting boards for the laying out of the slain, and large cork-lined boxes for their exhibition, and packets of pins for their impalement, and many butterfly nets for their original capture. Then there were packs of cards for diversion, and my mother had a great medicine-chest in case of illness. There were cool clothes for all of us in the blaze of the Alpine day, and warm clothes for the chill of the Alpine evenings; and each of us had a paint-box and a “Winsor and Newton” block, and Beth never moved without rolls of flannel and mustard plasters and cylinders of cotton-wool. Each one of us had an alpen-stock and huge hob-nailed boots, and when you consider that there were eight persons, each marvellously equipped for mental, physical, and artistic enterprises, you must only wonder that some mode of conveyance, if not all, was not fit to bear the strain of this transportation. But arrive at Gimmelwald we did, and while Maggie was prodigal with rose-madder this train of equipment somehow got inside the inn. Beth swooped on her flannel and her mustard plasters, my father established his Cyprian library in our sitting-room, my mother clutched her medicine-chest, and there was left an enormous pile of books, apparatus for botany, climbing, and entomology, which remained in a passage and was gradually broken up between its owners. I think that the last pressing-case for dried flowers, the last killing-bottle for the extinction of butterflies, can hardly have been clawed from that common heap before it was time to pack it all up again.

  Of that month certain indelibly vivid impressions remain. One was the ascent of the Schilthorn, popularly supposed to be 10,000 (ten thousand) feet in height, and to possess the witching attraction of owning “everlasting” snow. It was not, unless it has abbreviated itself very much since, anything near ten thousand feet high, and, as for the everlasting snow, we climbed through torrid uplands and finished by a mild rocky ascent without ever setting foot on any snow perishable or everlasting. True, there were patches of it on the northern face, and perhaps those may be there still. But it was an enchanting expedition, for we carried our alpen-stocks and the guide had a rope round his shoulders, and we started at five in the morning. My father had a guide-book with a Schilthorn panorama, and we sat on the top and rejoiced in the fact that we were ten thousand feet up in the air and that small quantities of everlasting snow were below us, and we followed his guiding finger as he pointed out the jewels in the crown of mountains that surrounded us.... We passed through Murren on the way down, and there saw English people playing lawn-tennis on one of the hotel courts, and never shall I forget my father’s upraised eyebrows and mouth of scorn as he said, “Fancy, playing lawn-tennis in sight of the Jungfrau!”

  But if there was some subtle profanity in playing lawn-tennis in sight of the Jungfrau, I thought it much more blasphemous to study “Medea” and the “Æneid” in the same sacred presence. I had a considerable spell of these, because it had been discovered that, although I was going to Marlborough without a scholarship, there was yet another of those odious competitions which I could enter for after I had got there. I had fondly thought that after this trinity of failures I had thor
oughly be-dunced myself and need make no more efforts, but it appeared that I was wholly mistaken, for next December there would be a chance of going in for Foundation Scholarships at my new school, and in that there would be less competition, for they were open only to sons of clergymen. So, after a few days’ holiday, out came the Greek dictionary and the Latin dictionary and the “Medea” and the “Æneid,” and I had a couple of hours every morning under my father’s tuition. I think he was very strict with me, for he still believed in the existence of my brains, and was determined that I should use them. But it is impossible to get good results from a small boy unless somehow interest is kindled, and there was often despair on the part of the teacher and resentful gloom on the part of the taught. Things came to a climax on one particular wet morning, when we were all seated in the sitting-room, Nellie with her logic, and Maggie with her political economy, and Hugh going swimmingly with his “nuces” under my mother’s instructions. One by one they all finished their tasks, and there was I left with a chorus in the “Medea” which I could not translate at all, getting more muddled and hopeless every minute, and making fresh mistakes as we went over it again, and my father getting exasperated with my stupidity. Stupid I was, but my chief ailment that morning was that I was frightened and addled and dazed with his displeasure. Right up till lunch time was I kept at my task that day, and in the afternoon there was a walk in the rain, and I got into some further disgrace for hitting Hugh with my umbrella in mere retaliation. I was “done to a turn” by this time, and I think my mother must have pointed that out, for next morning, anyhow, instead of that just and terrible thunder-cloud, when I brought up the weary chorus again for retranslation, my father was enchantingly encouraging, and slipped in little corrections when I made mistakes, as if I had corrected myself. There was no allusion to yesterday’s trouble, and under his approval my wits rallied themselves, and at the end he shut up the book with a delicious smile and told me that it was the best lesson I had ever brought him....

  CHAPTER VII. THE WIDENING HORIZONS

  MY father took me in person to Marlborough. I did not much relish that, since I thought, with private school ideas still hanging about me, that it would be a handicap to be known as the son of a man who wore black cloth gaiters, an apron, and a hat with strings at the side. That was all very well in Cornwall, where he was bishop, but here I should have preferred a parent who looked like other parents. He seemed to have no consciousness of being unusually dressed himself, and one incident in the few hours he stayed much impressed itself on me, for he came with me into some class-room or other where a lot of boys were sitting, talking and whistling, with their caps on. My father took off his hat when he entered (which again I thought showed a slight want of knowledge), and then, to my surprise, every boy in the place did the same. The whistling ceased, nobody laughed, and I went out again rather proud of him. He seemed to have done the right thing....

  Outside the College buildings there were two or three small boarding-houses and three large ones containing forty to fifty boys each, into one of which I should have gone if I had got the famous “House Scholarship.” As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick building of three stories, each of which constituted an incollege house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary: a big open space from the skylight to the basement occupied the centre of it, with two class-rooms and a boot-room in the basement. Round this open space ran three floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, and defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these three tiers of passages opened four dormitories on each floor, a class-room, one bathroom with three baths, a sitting and bedroom belonging to the house-master of each house, with corresponding accommodation for a second house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to the bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen boys slept in each of these dormitories, which were lit by day from three or four small windows, and for purposes of going to bed and getting up in the dark from one small gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a board punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and furnished with a corresponding number of crockery mugs to hold water for tooth-washing. A narrow shelf ran round the room above the beds, where brushes and combs were kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas-jet belonging to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had a chair by his bedside where he could put his clothes. As half the beds were directly below the windows, the occupants naturally objected to having their immediate windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy nights they were all shut. There were no partitions between the beds; all operations were conducted in wholesome publicity, and there was no objection to anybody saying his prayers. Each dormitory was known by a letter of the alphabet; the houses were called B 1, B 2, B 3, and every boy had his school number. Thus my dry description was Benson, E. F., 234, B 1, L.

  The day was a strenuous one. A clanging bell perambulating the passages murdered sleep at half-past six, and there was chapel at seven. If you chose to get up at half-past six, you had time for a cup of water-cocoa on the ground floor and for a bath. Usually you got up on the first sound of chapel-bell at 6:50, and, cocoa-less and with bootlaces flying, sped down the stairs and across the court to get within the gates outside chapel before a single fateful stroke of the bell announced that you were late. By the gate were stationed two masters who on the stroke put their arms across the entrance and prevented further ingress. If there were many boys outside at that critical moment they used to charge the masters and get in somehow, bearing down all opposition, and it was delightful on such occasions to be safely and legitimately inside and see a sort of football scrimmage going on. Usually, however, there would only be a few stragglers, who attempted no violence. Punishments for being late varied: on the first occasion there was no penalty, but if you persevered in tardiness, the penalties became unpleasantly heavy. But if you were late, you could at least do up your bootlaces and get a cup of cocoa.

  There was a lesson from about a quarter-past seven on the conclusion of chapel till a quarter-past eight. A wholly insufficient breakfast was then provided, consisting of tea ready mixed out of a tin can, a circular inch of butter, and bread; on certain mornings there was porridge. If you wanted anything beyond this fare, you had to buy it yourself at school-shop. But you took your private milk-jug in to breakfast and were given, I suppose, about a quarter of a pint of milk, which you kept for a purpose. During the morning there were two hours’ school and one hour’s preparation and an hour and a half leisure. There was meat and pudding for dinner at halfpast one, and thereafter the total provender provided was another inch of butter, with tea and bread, at six, and supper consisting of hard biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a glass of beer after evening chapel, about 8.45. I had an allowance, originally, of sixpence a week, which was soon increased to a shilling; and, quite rightly, the whole of that used to be spent in getting things to eat. These were consumed at that daily love-feast called “brewing,” which was a joyful affair and merits its own paragraph.

  “Brewing” was a social function; you brewed in your class-room with your friend, for everybody had a friend of some kind, and nobody brewed alone. This function took place at varying hours in the afternoon, as dictated by the hours of school, and rendered unnecessary the scanty affair called “tea” provided by the college commissariat. In fact, as a rule, nobody went into college tea at all, so bloated was he with liquid when poor, and with liquid mixed with cake when rich. Brewing had never anything to do with beer, for in winter you brewed tea or coffee, and in summer lemonade in large earthenware bowls, with straws or india-rubber pipes to drink it from. The tea itself you certainly brought from home (and when that was used up Beth would send me some more), sometimes you had sugar, and sometimes you hadn’t, and the milk was provided, as aforesaid, by the college commissariat, and thus the whole of your money could be devoted to cake. And there we sat each fellow by his friend, when football was over, with kettles in
terminably filled at the college pump, and put to boil on public gas-stoves, jealously watched in turn by you or your friend, and the fresh kettle-full of water was poured on the tea-leaves, and the last crumb of cake was devoured, and the last drop of milk was coaxed out of the jug, and you enjoyed the full fellowship of not quite enough to eat, scrupulously divided, and the romance of being fourteen or fifteen thickened and fructified. You quarrelled and made it up, and indeed there was very little quarrelling, and you looked round the class-room, and intrigued and wondered and loved, and spliced a broken squash-racket, and uncurled the interminable folds of felt of a burst fives-ball, down to the heart of cork that lay in the centre of it, and made fresh plans. Then if you were very prudent you washed out the teapot and the cups and saucers, and especially the milk-jug, because if you didn’t, it stank appallingly next morning, and in the morning you could not get any hot water. Cold water was of no use with a milk-jug: it had to be rinsed with hot water, unless you wanted to find dreadful curds when, next day, the fresh milk was poured into it. Bloated with tea you went to chapel again, and didn’t want any beer or cheese, and wished it was brewing-time again. Then there was an hour’s preparation in the house classroom, and if you had not had a bath in the morning very likely you had one at night, and the other boys drifted into your dormitory where already you lay warm and sleepy in bed, and perhaps the head of the house gave you a piece of hot buttered toast, as he came in, for prefects had the privilege of taking bread and butter away from hall, and you ate it sumptuously and wiped your greasy hands on the bedclothes. If there was a boy with the gift of narrative in the dormitory, he often told a story as soon as lights were put out (or rather the one gas-jet) until he or his hearers got sleepy, and the story faded into silence. A slippered footstep would be heard along the passage, and the house-master, candle in hand, made his round of the dormitories....