Читать книгу "C" - Maurice Baring - Страница 12

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It was in the Michaelmas half of his fifteenth year that C. underwent a startling mental change. In the summer holidays, one Sunday in church the vicar had mentioned the poet Shelley with disapprobation, and C. had wondered who he was. When he went back to Eton he was laid up shortly after the beginning of the term with a bad chill, and he stayed out for a week. He was kept in bed for three days, and when he was allowed to get up he sat in his Dame's room and discussed books with Miss Derwent, the matron. She was a great novel reader, but she did not care for verse. He asked her if she had ever read the works of Shelley, as, knowing that she was very High Church indeed, he had an instinct that there might be something in Shelley likely to rouse or to shock her ecclesiastical susceptibilities. Miss Derwent rustled and creaked all over at the name, and said that Shelley was a dreadful unbeliever.

"Was he a clergyman?" asked C.

"No," said Miss Derwent, "he was not so bad as that--not so bad as Renan."

C. resolved to read the works of Shelley.

As soon as he was up, he went to the school library and asked Burcher, the librarian, for the works of Shelley. Burcher produced three small volumes bound in red morocco, published by Moxon, in 1857. C. took home the third volume with him, which seemed to contain shorter poems.

He had just finished tea. He was sitting with Weigall in his room, which was one of the smallest and most encumbered of all the rooms in the house. It possessed a mantel-board covered with blue cloth and embossed with gilt nails, and a set of coloured hunting pictures bought in Eton, an ottoman, a bureau, slightly damaged by red-hot poker-work, and a table on which there was a maroon-coloured tablecloth covered with candle-grease stains, which C. and Weigall used to begin to remove when they became excessive, with a red-hot poker and a piece of blotting-paper. Tea had been cleared away. They had begun to sap. The room was stuffy from the heat of too many candles. It was a Thursday evening. Verses were done with, signed and written out. But both C. and Weigall had an Extra work looming in front of them. C. had done one sum, grappled with it for some time, and then after looking up the answer at the end of the book, put a large "W" meaning "wrong" next to it, thus admitting absolute and final defeat. He had drawn a line under that sum and begun another, which being easy he had solved almost at once. A triumphant "R," meaning "right," was put alongside of it, and a line drawn underneath it. Then C. had begun another sum and had become hopelessly stuck in it. He felt he could go on with it better after a slight interval of relaxation. Weigall was almost in exactly the same position. He had finished three sums of his Extra work (his was not the same as C.'s as they were not up to the same mathematical master), and had got stuck in a third. He, too, felt the imperative necessity for a slight interval. He fetched a paper bag from the sock cupboard, and the two mathematicians each consumed a banana. From the passage came the tempting sound of a game of football, but they resisted the call.

"We can't," said Weigall, "we've got far too much work to do."

"Yes," said C. "Far too much work to do. I've almost done an hour's work," he added. "The Friar says we need only do an hour's work, and I've done over half an hour."

"I've got stuck," said Weigall. "I can't get this equation out. There must be something wrong with it."

"Probably a misprint," suggested C.

"Piggy never takes that for an excuse," said Weigall dolefully.

"I think I shall do mine better a little later on," said C.

He walked up to his little bracket bookshelf and took from it the volume of Moxon's Shelley he had taken from the boys' library. He sat down in the solitary armchair in the room--a basket-work, rather diminutive, armchair stuffed with blue material. Weigall followed suit and fetched Three in Norway, a book he had read over and over again.

C. opened the volume of Shelley and came across The Cloud, which is at the beginning of the third volume, on p. 19. He read and experienced for the first time in his life what the printed words upon a page are capable of. He seemed to be caught up in a chariot of fire. Time and place were annihilated; one gorgeous vision after another swept him with dewy, rainbow wings; celestial bells seemed to be ringing in the air, and when it was all over something ineffable had been left behind. He was dazed. He thought he must be mistaken. He read the poem through slowly and silently again from the beginning until the end. Yes, it was all there. He had opened the gates of an undiscovered magical kingdom. He was bursting with the wonder of his discovery.

"Weigall, you must listen to this," he said. And he began to read it out.

Weigall put down Three in Norway, and listened in silence. He was quite interested, if a little puzzled. When C. came to this passage--

As on the jag of a mountain crag,

Which an earthquake rocks and swings,

An eagle alit one moment may sit

In the light of its golden wings

he paused.

"Isn't that wonderful?" he said.

"Yes," said Weigall, "but I don't think an eagle would do that."

"Why not?" said C.

"Oh," said Weigall, "because an eagle's wings aren't golden."

C. suddenly realised that Weigall was not quite as sympathetic an audience as you could wish for this music, but he went on reading till the end. When he had finished Weigall said:--

"Listen to this."

And he read out, by no means for the first time, the tragedy of a salmon which some one had failed to gaff after an hour of desperate playing.

"Children aren't salmon," said Weigall with a sigh, quoting from the book.

C. went on with Shelley, and every now and then he read an extract to Weigall, who tried to be as sympathetic as possible, although Shelley's natural history shocked him. At last he said, after rather a long excerpt from The Witch of Atlas:--

"I must go on with my Extra work.

"Well, I suppose I must too," said C., and they both raced through three more sums, none of which could be solved correctly.

It cannot be said they expended much effort over them, but a "W" was written against each uncompleted sum, and then Weigall said with a cry of relief:--

"I've done an hour's work, let's go and play passage football," and they went.

But C. had entered a new world. He felt he must talk to some one who would understand the nature of the marvellous discovery he had made.

That half he was up to a dry, prim master with a quiet sniggle and a current of gentle irony, and a general air of Miss Austen's novels about him. There was not much sympathy to be looked for in that quarter, and C. would rather have died than let his tutor, who, as a matter of fact, appreciated certain kinds of verse greatly, know that he read and enjoyed poetry. However, the supply, as so often happens, was soon destined to respond to the demand. C. found what he was looking for close at hand, in the acquaintance and companionship of a boy in the same division as himself, whom he almost immediately after this made friends with. This was a boy called Calmady, who was at a Dame's house. He was an idle and irrepressibly high-spirited boy, to whom work came quite easily, who had a facile talent for writing Latin verses without thinking of what he was doing. He was too lazy to excel in games, although he had a latent talent for cricket, which remained entirely undeveloped.

Calmady introduced C. in his turn to a friend of his called Bentham, who was in a division above them. Bentham was a Colleger. He was an alert and original boy, full of brains and mischief, and always carrying on a half-concealed war with authority. These three soon became inseparable, and formed a Triumvirate, an association of idleness. On long after-fours when they were not playing football, they would stroll up town to Califano's and drink chocolate and whipped cream, and Bentham would bait "Cali" till the latter threatened them all with a carving knife. Bentham organised a small society called the S.F.T.P.O.C.K., that is to say, the Society for the Prevention of Christian Knowledge, and besides the Triumvirate in question, one or two outsiders were allowed to be honorary members. Bentham had drawn up an elaborate book of rules. The first rule was: "No member is allowed to do his own verses or his own Extra work." The second rule was: "No member is allowed to prepare a Latin or Greek construe without the aid of a word-for-word translation"; and the third rule, which would have been the most irritating and monstrous of all in the eyes of the classical masters with a tradition, was: "No member, in translating English into Latin, is allowed to use the Latin-English Dictionary."

Bentham was a poet, a satiric poet, and he wrote pointed satires in the heroic couplet.

Calmady had imbibed considerable education at home. He came from a large family where French and German had been spoken, and his father possessed one of the finest libraries in England. His tastes were literary and musical, but he was an incurable dilettante. He learnt the violin, but resolutely refused to practise. In Calmady, C. found a willing ear into which to pour the discovery he had made of the poet Shelley. Calmady was steeped in the poetry of Byron, to which he introduced C., but up till this moment he had never read Shelley. C., up to the moment when he had discovered the three little red volumes in the school library, had never read nor looked at a line of more modern poetry. He had regarded all poetry as an unintelligible jargon which had to be learnt by heart. In the summer half before he had made Calmady's acquaintance, he had bought at Ingleton Drake's, and heaven knows why, a book of selections of verse and prose for recitation. In this book, alongside The Bells, by Edgar Allan Poe, and Count Robert of Sicily, by Longfellow, there was Keats's Ode to the Nightingale. C. had read this through one evening when he was changing, and had not understood one word of it. He had wondered what it was all about.

He now consulted Calmady about books in general. He found that Calmady was most understanding and shared his tastes. Calmady was also a passionate admirer of Marie Corelli, but Byron now was his chief idol, and he was greatly incensed because his tutor did not like Byron. He told C. about Byron. C. said rather solemnly that he had promised his mother not to read Don Juan, but he supposed he could read the rest. He remembered hearing her speak with respect of Childe Harold. He bought a selection of Byron in the Canterbury Poets, which he soon devoured. He then resolved to make discoveries for himself. These discoveries proceeded slowly at first. After the discovery of Shelley and a partial discovery of Byron they remained more or less stationary for a time. C., Calmady and Bentham had many other things to think of, and when they had any money to spend on books they usually bought novels. They each of them read Jane Eyre, and Weigall read it, too, and was enormously struck by it, and Fräulein Setzer gave C. Les Trois Mousquetaires as a Christmas present, and introduced C. to the magic of Alexandre Dumas.

C., Bentham and Calmady decided to collaborate in a novel or a romance, and later on to edit a newspaper. The novel was to be historical and to deal with the epoch of the French Revolution.

"But, of course," said Calmady, "we must read up the epoch."

With this object in view, C. began to read Carlyle's French Revolution, but he could not get beyond the first chapters. He consulted Miss Derwent on the matter, and she said she also found Carlyle's style dreadfully difficult, but fearfully interesting once you got into it. They searched the boys' library for works on the French Revolution, and they found a book of memoirs by Croker, which, however, was not quite what they needed. It assumed a certain knowledge of the period on the part of the reader. Nevertheless, the novel was begun. Calmady and C. were to write it, and Bentham was to write incidental lyrics and the verse at the beginning of each chapter, as in the Waverley Novels. Weigall was to do the illustrations of those parts which dealt with incidents in natural history. The title of the novel, which was to be in three volumes, was to be Clorinda, the reason for the Italianate name being that Bentham said that, if the novel were to be dramatised and turned into an opera (there was a boy in college, he said, who would write very good music for it), it was simpler to begin by having an Italian name, at least for the heroine. So the heroine became an Italian by birth, although domiciled in France. The whole of this novel was actually written, mostly in the boys' library, but some of it in school, in a black notebook bought at Williams' by Bentham, who wrote the whole of the text as well as the lyrics. It was profusely illustrated by Weigall, who insisted on the mother of the heroine being of Scottish descent--a Jacobite--in order to give him scope for some sporting scenes in the Highlands.

Bentham was allowed to take it home for the Christmas holidays, but at the beginning of the holidays he caught measles, and the novel, Clorinda, was burnt when his effects were disinfected, and so joined the poems of Calvus, the sonnets of Raphael, the original version of the first volume of Carlyle's French Revolution, Dante's picture, and other rare things that have irrevocably vanished. The authors did not feel the loss greatly; they were too intoxicated with the fumes of what Balzac called "enchanted cigarettes," that is to say, the planning and discussing of books to be written in the future.

When C. went back to Eton after those Christmas holidays he was sixteen, and he entered upon what proved to be the most enjoyable year of his school life.