Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 11

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C. went up for his naval examination in Michaelmas term of his third year at school. Mr. Forsyth and the whole staff of "Forsyth's" were optimistic as to the result, and the news of his complete failure fell like a bombshell both upon home and school. Mr. Forsyth attributed the failure to a bruise on his shin he had received in the football field just before the examination. Fräulein Setzer attributed it to the incapacity of his teachers, but she kept her opinions to herself. It was settled that he should stay two more terms at school and then go to Eton. His name had been put down for Winslow's when he was quite small. Eton was a part of the religion of the Hengrave family, and they considered it unthinkable that a member of their family should go to any other school. As C. could not become a sailor, it was thought that he might perhaps be able to pass into the Foreign Office, or possibly, better still, get "something in the City." There would be time to think of that later.

When the time came for C. to go to Eton, Winslow's was full up, and Mr. Winslow could not take him, nor could one or two other house-masters whom Lady Hengrave would have preferred, and C. was sent to Pringle's. It was a good house, but not conspicuous for stars either in the athletic or the intellectual world. The house boasted of only one boy in Sixth Form, and of no member either of the eleven, the eight, or even the Victory, and of no member of Pop.

In the house cup matches Pringle's never got further than the second ties, and did not always reach that stage. On the other hand, Pringle's was respected as being quite a "decent" house. This was largely due to Mr. Pringle's personality. There was something fundamentally gentlemanlike and urbane about him. He was polished, Attic, rather highly-strung, and given to nervous brain storms in school; an electric teacher, stimulating to boys he liked and got on with, but blighting to those whom he did not like, and a master of light but stinging irony.

When C. reached Eton he was still called at home the Ugly Duckling. And there was something at this epoch rather uncouth and overgrown about him, something immature and yet overripe. He was too big for his age and showed little promise of good looks, although there was something rather striking about his dark eyes and undisciplined hair. He was lanky and thin, and looked as if he had grown up too quickly. He was untidy, too, and his hair and his clothes looked as if they had never been brushed.

He took Upper Fourth on arrival, which was another shock both to Forsyth's and to Lady Hengrave, as they had confidently expected him to take Remove.

At the end of his first half the lower master whom he had been up to wrote in his report that he had been taught "small Latin and less Greek," and Mr. Pringle took a pessimistic view of the effects of his irreparable past on the future.

C.'s Eton career was a curious one. He was perfectly happy, enjoyed the life, did his work just well enough to pass trials and just not well enough to achieve ordinary distinction. He was sufficiently idle and disobedient to get into trouble every now and then, but sufficiently reserved and obstinate to weather rows with equanimity and without disaster.

It has been already recorded he was considered to be the best athlete at his private school. At Eton he passed athletically into a phase of total eclipse. He was naturally a good football player, and had he been at a house that was good at games he would have forcibly been pushed up the ladder of success. As it was, he played with bad players, and did what he found the others doing. He took the line of least resistance and conformed to his surroundings. He had no athletic ambitions. He was a wet bob. But it was a long time, and then only by accident, and at the instigation of one of the masters who had taken him out one day downstream, that he put his name down for Novice Eights. He ultimately got into the Lower Boats, but there he remained rooted. His Eton life was a curious life within a life. He had his own little circle, which escaped the notice of the crowd, and in that little circle he was happy.

When C. had been at Eton two years his brother Harry joined him; he was not sent to Pringle's, as there was room for him at Crutchleigh's, an athletic house which boasted of the presence of the Captain of the Boats, the Keeper of the Field, and two members of Sixth Form. Harry's career was very different from C.'s. He became a shining star in the cricket world, got his sixpenny his first summer term, and ended by playing at Lord's and being Master of the Beagles. He moved in a different universe to that of C.

C. looked on at the dawn and promise of these triumphs with admiration untinged by envy, and the two brothers would go for a walk together regularly every Sunday afternoon. They never criticised each other. Each accepted the other as inevitable, and Harry's success amply made up to Lady Hengrave for C.'s obscurity. In fact, C.'s obscurity enhanced Harry's success in her eyes. Had it been the other way round she could scarcely have borne it, and C. knew that.

C. did not get on very well with his tutor, Mr. Pringle. Mr. Pringle suspected in him a lurking spirit of opposition, and felt that he was more intelligent than his work showed him to be. He was sarcastic, and C. met his sarcasm with sullen silence. They just missed getting on. During his first half C. had nothing to do with his tutor as far as work was concerned. Mr. Pringle had no room for him at first, and sent him in company with two other new boys, to Mr. Oxley's pupil room, who acted as his tutor for the time being. It was only when he got into Remove that they came into direct contact, and at first there was little friction between them. Mr. Pringle used to call him a scamp and accuse him of "trying it on," but there was nothing more than that. It was when C. reached Upper Remove that a little incident dug an irreparable breach between C. and his tutor, although Mr. Pringle was quite unconscious of the fact.

One day the boys were construing Homer in pupil room, The Odyssey. C. was fascinated by The Odyssey. They were construing in the Tenth Book, a passage which tells how Odysseus came to the Palace of Circe in the Island of Ææa. C. was put on to construe at line 211.

This is how he translated the passage:--

"They saw in the glades the well-built house of Circe, of polished marble, in a conspicuous place, and around were mountain wolves and lions which she had subdued by enchantment, since she had given them wicked herbs."

"'Wicked herbs,' that's good," said Mr. Pringle. "Very good." Then he caught himself up and said "You may be taking me in, you probably are taking me in."

"Wicked herbs" was Dryden's rendering, and quoted in Pope's Odyssey, a book which C. had read at home. C. was profoundly hurt by his tutor's bantering distrust, and that was the last time he made the slightest attempt to construe a passage well in pupil room.

Another time C.'s tutor had told his boys to learn for private a passage from Pope, the famous passage about Addison, which C., as a matter of fact, had known ever since he was nine years old. It was a passage that Lady Hengrave had insisted on her sons learning in the schoolroom.

"Go on, Bramsley," said Mr. Pringle to C. C. hesitated for a little and then began to spout:--

Peace be to you!

"No, no," said Mr. Pringle, in an agony of impatience,

Peace to all such!

C. began again:--

But were there one whose fires,

Peace to all such!

True genius kindles and the blame inspires.

Mr. Pringle buried his face in his hands, and then lifted his head as though shattered by the nerve-wracking experience.

"Don't you see that besides murdering the verse you're talking nonsense?" he said.

"I don't know what it's all about, Sir," said C.

"It doesn't matter whether you know or not. You must take it from me that it's good, as good as verse can be, and if you don't like it, dub yourself a fool."

"Yes, Sir," said C. calmly, and went on massacring the lines with perverse ingenuity, saying, for instance: "Brook no arrivals to the Turkish throne," instead of "Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne." And "Damn with vain praise assent without a tear," till Mr. Pringle could bear it no more.

"Dub yourself a fool, dub yourself a fool," he said, and he put some one else on.

C. was perfectly consistent in his conduct with regard to all the masters. With the French masters he pretended not to understand a word of French, and with the German master, not to understand a word of German. This deceived some of the French masters but not all of them. M. Bué, who was a man who stood no nonsense, told C. that he saw through his British accent, and that he was not going to stand it, so C. was reluctantly obliged to modify his feigned ignorance, although he managed never to reveal the full extent of his knowledge or capacity. With the mathematical masters he was able, without pretence, to maintain an attitude of invincible ignorance. With the classical masters he assumed an attitude of respectable mediocrity, which on the whole met with toleration, if not with approval.

C. made no great friends at his tutor's, with the exception of one boy, whom he messed with, called Weigall. This was a matter-of-fact boy, who came from Yorkshire. Weigall was C.'s greatest friend in the house. The link which bound them was natural history. Weigall was an ardent naturalist and an impassioned bird's egg collector, and C. and Weigall spent hours together at a taxidermist's shop in Windsor, where they learnt bird-stuffing. Weigall had come to Eton the same half as C., and they had gone up to the school together. They messed together ever since their first half, and had always been in the same division, and they both read and revelled in the works of Marie Corelli. C. thought her works were quite entrancing, and he enjoyed the fierce satire and vehement sentiments of that authoress as much as her daring imagination. His tutor, when he used to come round in the evenings after prayers, used always to find at that time a book by Marie Corelli on the table, and when he saw it he used to snort. C. used to put it there on purpose, knowing that the bait was sure to get a rise.

"How can you read such stuff?" Mr. Pringle would say.

"Oh, but, Sir, it's awfully good!" C. used to say.

Mr. Pringle begged him to read the works of R. L. Stevenson, and C. obstinately refused to do this, although he had read and enjoyed Treasure Island in secret. He was not ashamed of admitting to his admiration for Rider Haggard. He had been enthralled by She, when he read it at his private school, but he was still more enthralled when he re-read the book three years later at Eton, when he was sixteen. He thought it the most wonderful book that the human mind could imagine, a vision of thrilling beauty and a soul-shattering tragedy, a world epic. When asked by one of the division masters, Mr. Cobden, who was the greatest English author, he said, without hesitation, Rider Haggard. Mr. Cobden, who liked originality and hated the conventionality of boys, was not displeased, and said it was a great thing to know one's mind. C. was sixteen years old when he was up to Mr. Cobden in the summer half. This master had a powerful effect on him. Mr. Cobden saw that C. was not the average boy he pretended to be, and found out that he had a queer storehouse of disjointed, out-of-the-way knowledge in him. Under his tuition C. consented to recognise quotations from Shakespeare, although he had not yet read any of the plays, and knew no more of them than the passages he had learnt by heart as a child. But Mr. Cobden interested him, and he showed his interest and answered the master's questions. Mr. Cobden called him an idle brat, but he was interested, and said in his report at the end of that summer half that C. was "an uncommonly sharp and thoughtful lad." His tutor was astonished to learn that C. was at the top of his division that half, and had been presented by Mr. Cobden with Boswell's Life of Johnson, bound in white vellum, honoris causa.

"Have you ever read this?" asked Mr. Cobden, as he wrote C.'s name in it.

"No, sir."

"Well," said Mr. Cobden, "it's the best book in the world."

C. felt quite certain that Mr. Cobden was speaking the truth.